Before the autumn was at an end, and while the brown leaves still stood
thick on the beeches in our park, my brother and Bertha were engaged to
each other, and it was understood that their marriage was to take place
early in the next spring. In spite of the certainty I had felt from that
moment on the bridge at Prague, that Bertha would one day be my wife, my
constitutional timidity and distrust had continued to benumb me, and the
words in which I had sometimes premeditated a confession of my love, had
died away unuttered. The same conflict had gone on within me as
before--the longing for an assurance of love from Bertha's lips, the
dread lest a word of contempt and denial should fall upon me like a
corrosive acid. What was the conviction of a distant necessity to me? I
trembled under a present glance, I hungered after a present joy, I was
clogged and chilled by a present fear. And so the days passed on: I
witnessed Bertha's engagement and heard her marriage discussed as if I
were under a conscious nightmare--knowing it was a dream that 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 to treat me with a playful patronage that wakened no
jealousy in my brother--I spent my time chiefly in wandering, in
strolling, or taking long rides while the daylight lasted, and then
shutting myself up with my unread books; for books had lost the power of
chaining my attention. My self-consciousness was heightened to that
pitch of intensity in which our own emotions take the form of a drama
which urges itself imperatively on our contemplation, and we begin to
weep, less under the sense of our suffering than at the thought of it. I
felt a sort of pitying anguish over the pathos of my own lot: the lot of
a being finely organized for pain, but with hardly any fibres that