Part 1. In The Night
Part 1. In The Night - Chapter 1
_ PART I. IN THE NIGHT CHAPTER I
For years I had been preoccupied with thoughts of love--and by love I mean a noble and sensuous passion, absorbing the energies of the soul, fulfilling destiny, and reducing all that has gone before it to the level of a mere prelude. And that afternoon in autumn, the eve of my twenty-first birthday, I was more deeply than ever immersed in amorous dreams.
I, in my modern costume, sat down between two pairs of candles to the piano in the decaying drawing-room, which like a spinster strove to conceal its age. A generous fire flamed in the wide grate behind me: warmth has always been to me the first necessary of life. I turned round on the revolving stool and faced the fire, and felt it on my cheeks, and I asked myself: ‘Why am I affected like this? Why am I what I am?‘ For even before beginning to play the Fantasia of Chopin, I was moved, and the tears had come into my eyes, and the shudder to

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