Reverse

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."
"THREE o'clock in the morning. The soft April night is looking in at my windows and caressingly winking at me with its stars. I can't sleep, I am so happy!

"My whole being from head to heels is bursting with a strange, incomprehensible feeling. I can't analyse it just now—I haven't the time, I'm too lazy, and there—hang analysis! Why, is a man likely to interpret his sensations when he is flying head foremost from a belfry, or has just learned that he has won two hundred thousand? Is he in a state to do it?"

This was more or less how I began my love-letter to Anna, 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 fervent, 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 Anna gazed at me after I had said goodbye to her. When I was saying good-bye to Anna I was thinking of nothing and was simply admiring her figure as every 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 carry out certain formalities.

It is a great delight also to seal up a love-letter, and, slowly putting on one's hat and coat, to go softly out of the house and to carry the treasure to the post. There are no stars in the sky now: in their place there is a long whitish streak in the east, broken here and there by clouds above the roofs of the dingy houses; from that streak the whole sky is flooded with pale light. The town is asleep, but already the water-carts have come out, and somewhere in a far-away factory a whistle sounds to wake up the workpeople. Beside the postbox, slightly moist with dew, you are sure to see the clumsy figure of a house porter, wearing a bell-shaped sheepskin and carrying a stick. He is in a condition akin to catalepsy: he is not asleep or awake, but something between. And then one night...

Prem: Baby, we need to talk.

Anna: Prem, what do you mean?

Prem: Something has come up...

Anna: What? What's wrong? Is it bad?

Prem: I don't want to hurt you, baby.

Anna: *Thinks* Oh my God, I hope he doesn't break up with me... I love him so much.

Prem: Baby, are you there?

Anna: Yeah, I'm here. What is so important?

Prem: I'm not sure if I should say it..

Anna: Well, you already brought it up, so please just tell me.

Prem: I'm leaving..

Anna: Baby, what are you talking about? I don't want you to leave me, I love you.

Prem: Not like that, I mean I'm moving far away.

Anna: Why? All of your family lives over here.

Prem: Well, my dad is sending me away to a boarding school far away.

Anna: I can't believe this.