Before the autumn was at an end, and while the brown leaves still stood thick on thebeeches in our park, my brother and Bertha were engaged to each other, and it wasunderstood that their marriage was to take place early in the next spring. In spite of thecertainty I had felt from that moment on the bridge at Prague, that Bertha would one daybe my wife, my constitutional timidity and distrust had continued to benumb me, and thewords in which I had sometimes premeditated a confession of my love, had died awayunuttered. The same conflict had gone on within me as before-the longing for anassurance of love from Bertha's lips, the dread lest a word of contempt and denial shouldfall upon me like a corrosive acid. What was the conviction of a distant necessity to me? Itrembled under a present glance, I hungered after a present joy, I was clogged and chilledby a present fear. And so the days passed on: I witnessed Bertha's engagement and heardher marriage discussed as if I were under a conscious nightmare-knowing it was a dreamthat would vanish, but feeling stifled under the grasp of hard-clutching fingers.When I was not in Bertha's presence-and I was with her very often, for she continued totreat me with a playful patronage that wakened no jealousy in my brother-I spent mytime chiefly in wandering, in strolling, or taking long rides while the daylight lasted, andthen shutting myself up with my unread books; for books had lost the power of chainingmy attention. My self-consciousness was heightened to that pitch of intensity in which ourown emotions take the form of a drama which urges itself imperatively on ourcontemplation, and we begin to weep, less under the sense of our suffering than at thethought of it. I felt a sort of pitying anguish over the pathos of my own lot: the lot of a beingfinely organized for pain, but with hardly any fibres that responded to pleasure-to whomthe idea of future evil robbed the present of its joy, and for whom the idea of future gooddid not still the uneasiness of a present yearning or a present dread. I went dumblythrough that stage of the poet's suffering, in which he feels the delicious pang of utterance, and makes an image of his sorrows.I was left entirely without remonstrance concerning this dreamy wayward life: I knew myfather's thought about me: "That lad will never be good for anything in life: he may wastehis years in an insignificant way on the income that falls to him: I shall not trouble myselfabout a career for him."