This was more or less how I began my love-letter to Sasha a girl of nineteen with whom I had fallen in love. I began it five times and as often tore up the sheets scratched out whole pages and copied it all over again. I spent as long over the letter as if it had been a no­vel I had to write to order. And it was not because I tried to make it longer more elaborate and more fer vent but because I wanted endlessly to prolong the process of this writing when one sits in the stillness of one's study and communes with one's own day-dre­ams while the spring night looks in at one's window. Between the lines I saw a beloved image and it seemed to me that there were sitting at the same table writing with me spirits as naïvely happy as foolish and as blissfully smiling as I. I wrote continually loo­king at my hand which still ached deliciously where hers had lately pressed it and if I turned my eyes away I had a vision of the green trellis of the little gate. Through that trellis Sasha gazed at me after I had said goodbye to her. When I was saying good-bye to Sasha I was thinking of nothing and was simply admiring her figure as ever y decent man admires a pretty woman; when I saw through the trellis two big eyes I suddenly as though by inspiration knew that I was in love that it was all settled between us and fully decided already that I had nothing left to do but to carr y out certain formalities.