With considerable pleasure I repeat: “Donkey!”
Now everything is perfectly clear and distinct before my eyes again.
There is the fountain, there the alley of box-wood, there the house
which I am slowly approaching.
Yet—suddenly the appearance is here again. Behind the green screen
through which the moonlight gleams so that it seems embroidered with
silver, I again see the white figure, the woman of stone whom I adore,
whom I fear and flee.
With a couple of leaps I am within the house and catch my breath and
reflect.
What am I really, a little dilettante or a great big donkey?
A sultry morning, the atmosphere is dead, heavily laden with odors, yet
stimulating. Again I am sitting in my honey-suckle arbor, reading in
the Odyssey about the beautiful witch who transformed her admirers into
beasts. A wonderful picture of antique love.
There is a soft rustling in the twigs and blades and the pages of my
book rustle and on the terrace likewise there is a rustling.