"I am not past it, then,"
he said to himself, repeating the phrase which had leaped from his
heart when he saw Alice descending the stairs. "I hardly thought that
such a thing could ever happen to me. She is the only one." His
thoughts ran back to a night in Heidelberg, when he sat in the shadow
of the castle wall with a German student of his acquaintance, and
looked far over the valley at the lights of the town and the rippling
waves of the Neckar, silvered by the soft radiance of the summer moon.
"Poor Hammerstein! How he raved that night about little Bertha von
Eichholz. He called her _Die Einzige_ something like a thousand times.
It seemed an absurd thing to say; I knew dozens just like her, with
blue eyes and Gretchen braids. But Hammerstein meant it, for he shot
himself the week after her wedding with the assessor. But mine _is_ the
Only One--though she is not mine. I would rather love her without hope
than be loved by any other woman in the world."
A few days before he had been made happy by perceiving that she was no
longer a child; now he took infinite pleasure in the thought of her
youth; he tilled his mind and his senses with the image of her
freshness, her clear, pure color, the outline of her face and form.
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