She even quelled the sensuality of her self-surrender, and veiled it with a show of shame-faced backwardness and the adorable ingenuousness of a schoolgirl on her honeymoon.

She strove to obliterate the remembrances of the heathenish abandonment of the first days, with their unrestrained impulses, testifying all too plainly to the fact that she was a woman well versed in all the arts of seduction.

At first this was dissimulation, the maneuvers of a shrewd, reader of character, but it soon came to be instinct and second nature; she deceived herself honestly, and returned, in her own mind, to the pristine virginity of her soul and body, finally coming to look upon herself as a simple-minded girl, ignorant of the world and of life, and conscious only of her boundless love for this one glorious man, and to whom the memories of a less harmless past seemed like wicked dreams sent by the Tempter to molest her chastity.

This self-deception, or rather retrogression of her instincts, led her into touches of mysticism.

The story of little Sonia who had fallen in love with the ten-year-old Wilhelm at first sight, to die shortly afterward with his name upon her lips, made a deep impression on her, and set her dreaming.