We sat together one evening--Eugen and I, after Sigmund had been in bed a long time, after the opera was over--chatting, as we often did, or as often remained silent. He had been reading, and the book from which he read was a volume of English poetry. At last, laying the book aside, he said:
"The first night we met, you fainted away from exhaustion and long fasting. You said you would tell me why you had allowed yourself to do so, but you have never kept your word."
"I didn't care to eat. People eat to live--except those who live to eat, and I was not very anxious to live, I didn't care for my life, in fact, I wished I was dead."
"_I, bewahre!_ I never knew what it was to be in love in my life," said I, with perfect truth.
"Is that true, Friedel?" he asked, apparently surprised.
"As true as possible. I think a timely love affair, however unlucky, would have roused me and brought me to my senses again."
"Oh, I was alone in the world. I had been reading, reading, reading; my brain was one dark and misty muddle of Kant, Schopenhauer, von Hartmann, and a few others. I read them one after another, as quickly as possible; the mixture had the same effect upon my mind as the indiscriminate contents of taffy-shop would have upon Sigmund's stomach--it made it sick. In my crude, ungainly, unfinished fashion I turned over my information, laying down big generalizations upon a foundation of experience of the smallest possible dimensions, and all upon one side."
"And after considering the state of the human race--that is to say the half dozen people I knew, and the miseries of the human lot as set forth in the books I had read, and having proved to myself, all up in that little room, you know"--I pointed to my bedroom--"that there neither was nor could be heaven or hell or any future state, and having decided, also from that room, that there was no place for me in the world, and that I was very likely actually filling the place of some other man, poorer than I was, and able to think life a good thing" (Eugen was smiling to himself in great amusement), "I came to the conclusion that the best thing I could do was to leave the world."
"Were you going to starve yourself to death? That is rather a tedious process, _nicht wahr_?"