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. "When sweet little Sonia died I was
born.
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