I should find it hard to determine what was so exceptional about her, what it was abut her that I liked so much, but, at the time at dinner, it was all perfectly clear to me. I saw a young woman, beautiful, kind, intelligent, fascinating such a woman as I had never met before, and at once I sensed in her a being near to me and already familiar, as though I’d see that face, those friendly, intelligent eyes long ago, in my childhood, in the album which lay on my mother's chest of drawers.
I didn’t think of her, but as though her shadow was lying lightly on my soul.
I saw her and again there was the same irresistible, striking impression of beauty and lovely, caressing eyes, and again the same feeling of nearness.
Her gaze, the elegant, exquisite hand she gave me, her simple dress, the way she did her hair, her voice, her gait always produced the same impression on me something new and extraordinary and very significant.
I kept trying to understand why she met just him first and not me, and why such a terrible mistake need have happened in our lives.
I loved her tenderly, deeply, but i reflected and kept asking myself what our love could lead to if we didn’t have the strength to fight against it.
It seemed incredible to me that my gentle, sad love could all at once rudely break up the even course of her life, her children and the whole household in which I was so trusted. Would it be honorable? She would follow me, but where? Where could I take her? it would have been different if I had been fighting for the liberation of my country, for instance or had been a celebrated scholar, an actor or a painter; but as things were it would mean taking her from one humdrum life to another as humdrum or perhaps more so. And how long would our happiness last? What would happen to her if I fell ill, if I died or if we simply stopped loving each other?
And she was tormented by the question whether her lobe would bring me happiness- whether she would not complicate my life, which as it was she believed to be hard enough and full of all sorts of trouble.
love is usually poeticized, embellished with roses, nightingales, but we embellish our loves with the fatal questions.
When our eyes met right there, our spiritual strength deserted us both, I took her in my arms, she pressed her face to my breast, and tears flowed from her eyes. Kissing her face, her shoulders, her hand wet with tears- oh how miserable we were! I confessed my love to her, and with a burning pain in my heart realized how needless and petty and deceptive was all that hindered us from loving each other. I realized that when you love you must either, in your reasoning about that love, start from what is higher, more important than happiness or unhappiness, sin or virtue in their usual meaning or you must not reason at love.
When we are in love, we never stop asking ourselves whether it is honorable or dishonorable, sensible or stupid, what this love will lead to and so on. if that's a good thing or not I don’t know but that is a hindrance and a source of dissatisfaction and irritable, of that I am certain....
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