When I think of her whom I loved last, longest and most
devotedly, then she herself, her own personality, is a certainty to me
that I would not willingly relinquish for any higher certainty, many
years though I have spent in anxious pondering on this subject.
The list of my boy friends is not worth recording. They were puppets
wondrously decked out by my fertile imagination, worshipped as heroes
for a while with all the ritual of German friendship cult - and later,
when in their personal life they showed no resemblance to my ideal
expectations, rudely dismantled and cast aside and hated. I can still
see a photograph of one of them lying in my washbowl with pierced eyes,
curling and charring under the avenging flame of a match.
The last of the series, the young commercial traveller, longest
retained his glory. I saw him only about a week in a watering place,
and subsequently he was able to maintain his position of hero-friend by
a correspondence in which he answered my fervent ingenuousness
stammered in poor German with fluent plagiarism from the classics of
his romantic fatherland.
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