In the course of the summer he fell in love with the twenty-year-old daughter of the inspector who often came to the parish clerk's. He never spoke to her, but used to spy out her walks, and often went near her house. The whole affair was only a silent worship of her beauty from a distance, without desire, and without hope. His feeling resembled a kind of secret trouble, and might as well have been directed towards anyone else, if girls had been numerous there. It was a Madonna-worship which demanded nothing except to bring the object of his worship some great sacrifice, such as drowning himself in the water under her eyes. It was an obscure consciousness of his own inadequacy as a half man, who did not wish to live without being completed by his "better half."

He continued to attend church-services, but they made no impression on him; he found them merely tedious.

This summer formed an important stage in his development, for it broke the links with his home. None of his brothers were with him. He had accordingly no intermediary bond of flesh and blood with his mother. This made him more complete in himself, and hardened his nerves; but not all at once, for sometimes he had severe attacks of homesickness. His mother's image rose up in his mind in its usual ideal shape of protectiveness and mildness, as the source of warmth and the preserver.

In summer, at the beginning of August, his eldest brother Gustav was going to a school in Paris, in order to complete his business studies and to learn the language. But previous to that, he was to spend a month in the country and say good-bye to his brother. The thought of the approaching parting, the reflected glory of the great town to which his brother was going, the memory of his brother's many heroic feats, the longing for home and the joy to see again someone of his own flesh and blood,—all combined to set John's emotion and imagination at work. During the week in which he expected his brother, he described him to a friend as a sort of superman to whom he looked up. And Gustav certainly was, as a man, superior to him. He was a plucky, lively youth, two years older than John, with strong, dark features; he did not brood, and had an active temperament; he was sagacious, could keep silence when necessary, and strike when occasion demanded it. He understood economy, and was sparing of his money. "He was very wise," thought the dreaming John. He learned his lessons imperfectly, for he despised them, but he understood the art of life.

John needed a hero to worship, and wished to form an ideal out of some other material than his own weak clay, round which his own aspirations might gather, and now he exercised his art for eight days. He prepared for his brother's arrival by painting him in glowing colours before his friends, praised him to the teacher, sought out playing-places with little surprises, contrived a spring-board at the bathing-place, and so on.