ugly but high-minded one. The aristocrat who seduces the little goose, is opposed to the working man who feels aristocratic, and behaves accordingly. It is impossible to tell character from people's looks. Who could tell from her looks that she is tormented by sensual desires?
In the same year in which the little girl started her butterfly collection, the region in which they were staying suffered much from a pest of June bugs. The children made havoc among the bugs, and crushed them cruelly. At that time she saw a person who tore the wings off the June bugs and ate them. She herself had been born in June and also married in June. Three days after the wedding she wrote a letter home, telling how happy she was. But she was by no means happy.
During the evening before the dream she had rummaged among her old letters and had read various ones, comical and serious, to her family—an extremely ridiculous letter from a piano-teacher who had paid her attention when she was a girl, as well as one from an aristocratic admirer.[1]
She blames herself because a bad book by de Maupassant had fallen into the hands of one of her daughters.[2] The arsenic which her little girl asks for recalls the arsenic pills which restored the power of youth to the Due de Mora in Nabab.
"Set at liberty" recalls to her a passage from the Magic Flute:
"I cannot compel you to love,
But I will not give you your liberty."
"June bugs" suggests the speech of Katie:[3]
"I love you like a little beetle."
Meanwhile the speech from Tannhauser: "For you are wrought with evil passion."
She is living in fear and anxiety about her absent husband. The dread that something may happen to him on the journey is expressed in numerous fancies of the day. A little while before, during the analysis, she had come upon a complaint
