Sunday, May 19:
Much coughing, not a good night. But R. slept well, and though awaiting my recovery with considerable impatience, he is nevertheless well! He works.
Yesterday he told me he feared he would take it as far as the kiss, then break off. “Do that,” say I. “Yes, but on the other hand, my zeal is boundless.” “What a lot of things come into his mind with this kiss!” R. says. “She was trying too hard.” As I am wandering up and down in my room around lunchtime, he gently parts the curtains and says to me, “It will be all right.” He had interrupted his work to bring me this consolation.
In the evening he goes through the Flower Maidens’ scene with friend Seidl, and this gives us quite a different pleasure from the recent occasion, when the undoubtedly very gifted musician from Israel played the same thing to us with such tingling fluency, his eyes darting everywhere, as if engaged in a business deal! Before this delight I had been reading Tauler, with infinite delight, edification, and indeed consolation: the advice he gives one, always to imagine Christ present in everything one does, has a powerful effect on me; to have that mild, suffering countenance in one’s mind at all times, I feel one might do that, and how much good it would do one, how completely it would banish all evil, all will power!
An evening of conversation for the sake of the others. They soon depart, and R. then comes to my bedside for a short while; conversation about Tauler, then memories of our life, how I fell asleep when I was carrying Fidi, and he read Schopenhauer to me!