He said to himself: she is too heavy. He was dumbfounded at her conduct, and displeased with it.
"The gloomy house oppresses you," he said in a tone of ill humour, when she smiled in her helpless way.
"Let us run a race," he said to her one day as they were taking a walk through the country. An old tree in the distance that had been struck by lightning was to be their objective.
They ran as fast as their feet could carry them. At a distance of about ten metres from the tree, Gertrude collapsed. He carried her over to the meadow.
"Too heavy for you?" she asked with wide-opened eyes. He shrugged his shoulders.
Then she slipped out of his embrace, sprang to her feet, and ran with remarkable swiftness a distance that was twice as long as the one he had staked off; she did not fall; she did not want to fall; she dared not.
Breathing heavily and pale as a corpse, she waited until he came up. But he had no tenderness for her now; he merely scolded. Arm in arm they walked on. Gertrude felt for his hand; he gave it to her, and she pressed it to her bosom.
Daniel was terrified as he looked into her face, and saw her thoughts written there as if in letters of fire: We belong to each other for time and eternity.
She lay wide awake until late at night. She heard him go into the kitchen and get a drink of water and then return to his room. He had forbidden her to come to the door and ask whether he was not going to bed soon: she was not to do this, it made no difference how late it was.
Then he lay beside her, his head on his arm, and looked at her with eyes that had lost their earthly, temporal glow. Man, where are your eyes anyway, she would have liked to exclaim. And yet she knew where they were; she knew, too, that it is dangerous to disturb a somnambulist by calling to him.
One night he had found it impossible to do his work. He sat down on the edge of the bed and stared into the light of the lamp for an hour or so, hating himself. Gertrude saw how he raged at himself; how he really fed, nourished his lack of confidence in himself. But she could not say anything.
A publisher had returned one of his manuscripts with a courteous but depressing conventional rejection slip. Daniel spoke disparagingly of his talents; he had lost hope in his future; he was bitter at the world; he felt that he was condemned to a life of unceasing obscurity.