““I observe her in astonishment, she is so changed. Has memory played me false here too, then? Did it grow and grow too, until it has outgrown the reality? —This rather loud girl sitting here at the table and talking much too much is a stranger to me. But concealed under that manner must there not be perhaps some one that I do know better? Does a thing become so distorted then, just because one gets older? —Perhaps it is the years, I say to myself. It is more than three years now—she was sixteen then and a child; now she is nineteen and grown up. And suddenly I am conscious of the nameless sadness of Time that runs and runs on and changes, and when a man returns he shall find nothing again. —Yes, it is a hard thing to part; but to come back again, that is sometimes far harder.””
