immediately afterwards I was again at the assault, she once more on the
alert, and after the lapse of four months our ways separated, without a
kiss, or one simple, affectionate word, ever having passed between us.

In my morbid self-duplication, I had been busy all this time fixing in
my memory and writing down in a book all that I had said to her or she
to me, weighing and probing the scope and effect of the words that had
been uttered, laying plans for future methods of advance, noting actual
victories and defeats, pondering over this inanity, bending over all
this abnormality, like a strategist who, bending over the map, marks
with his nail the movements of troops, the carrying or surrender of a
fortified position.

This early, unsatisfactory and not strictly speaking erotic experience
had the remarkable effect of rendering me for the next seven years
impervious to the tender passion, so that, undisturbed by women or
erotic emotions, I was able to absorb myself in the world of varied
research that was now opening up to me.


II.

A school-friend who was keenly interested in astronomy and had directed
my nightly contemplations of the heavens, drew me, just about this time,
a very good map of the stars, by the help of which I found those stars I
knew and extended my knowledge further.

The same school-friend sometimes took me to the Observatory, to see old
Professor d'Arrest--a refined and sapient man--and there, for the first
time, I saw the stellar heavens through a telescope. I had learnt