]
From Strassburg he proceeded to Emmendingen, where he spent the first
week of June with his sister, whom he had not seen since her marriage
with Schlosser. For various reasons he had looked forward to their
meeting with painful feelings. He knew that she had been unhappy in
her marriage, and must expect to find her naturally depressed temper
soured by her conjugal experience. Their main theme of conversation
was his betrothal to Lili, and it was with a vehemence born of her own
bitter experience that Cornelia urged him to break off a connection
which the relations of all immediately concerned too surely foreboded
must end in disaster. The warning of Cornelia, we might have expected,
should have been welcome as confirming his own struggling attempts to
break loose from his bonds, but, if his later memories did not betray
him, it only laid a heavier load on his heart. His real state of mind
at the time we have in a letter to Johanna Fahlmer, written while he
was still with his sister. "I feel," he wrote, "that the chief aim of
my journey has failed, and when I return it will be worse for the
Bear[223] than before. I know well that I am a fool, but for that very
reason I am I.
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