I delighted in her beauty just as I delighted in the beauty of the mountains and the sky, nor could I help delighting in her, for she is as beautiful as they.

I found that the sight of her beauty had become a necessity of my life and I began asking myself whether I did not love her.

But I could find nothing within myself at all like love as I had imagined it to be.
Mine was not the restlessness of loneliness and desire for marriage, nor was it platonic, still less a carnal love such as I have experienced.

I needed only to see her, to hear her, to know that she was near--and if I was not happy, I was at peace.
'After an evening gathering at which I met her and touched her, I felt that between that woman and myself there existed an indissoluble though unacknowledged bond against which I could not struggle, yet I did struggle.

I asked myself: "Is it possible to love a woman who will never understand the profoundest interests of my life?
Is it possible to love a woman simply for her beauty, to love the statue of a woman ?" But I was already in love with her, though I did not yet trust to my feelings.
'After that evening when I first spoke to her our relations changed.
Before that she had been to me an extraneous but majestic object of external nature: but since then she has become a human being.