Strait is the Gate 5
The time till the Christmas holidays was so short that my faith, quickened as it had been by my last conversation with Alissa, never for a moment wavered. As I had resolved, I wrote to her at length every Sunday; during the rest of the week I kept apart from my fellow-students, and frequented hardly anyone but Abel: I lived with the thought of Alissa, and covered my favourite books with notes meant for her eye, subordinating the interest I sought in them myself to the interest which they might have for her. Her letters caused me some uneasiness; and though she answered mine pretty regularly, her keenness to keep up with me seemed, I thought, to come more from anxiety to encourage my work than from her own spontaneous inclination1; and it even seemed to me that, while on my part reflections, discussions, criticisms were only means towards expressing my thoughts, she, on the contrary, took advantage of all these things to conceal2 hers. Sometimes I wondered whether she were not act...