Between the younger daughter and me there gradually came about a beautiful friendship (In about the years 1879-1884 Steiner had a friend in Vienna where he often visited the family. This younger daughter was a sister of that friend. RvD). She really had in her something of the primal type of the German maiden. She bore in her soul nothing acquired from her education, but expressed in her life an original and charming naturalness together with a noble reserve, and this reserve of hers caused a like reserve in me. We loved each other, and both of us were fully aware of this; but neither of us could overcome the fear of saying that we loved each other. Thus the love lived between the words we spoke to each other, and not in the words themselves. I felt the relationship as to our souls was of the most universal kind; but it found no possibility of taking a single step beyond what is of the soul.
I was happy in this friendship; I felt my girlfriend like something of the sun in my life. Yet this life later bore us far apart. In place of hours of happy companionship there then remained only a short-lived correspondence, followed by the melancholy memory of a beautiful period of my past life – a memory, however, which has through all my later life arisen again and again from the depths of my soul.
Source: Rudolf Steiner – GA 28 – The Story of my Life: Chapter VII
The great Rudolf Steiner Quotes Site 