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Theodore Fontane's 1895 novel, Effi Briest, is a tragic story of marital infidelity and social rejection. The authors are concerned with Effi's seemingly unrealistic and self-destructive keeping of the letters she had received from her lover. The discovery of these letters eventually led, in the inexorable mores of the time, to a duel between her husband and her lover, to her lover's death, and to the rejection of Effi. As one of the characters in the novel expressed it, "It is unbelievable—first to write such letters and then keep such letters from others. What are furnaces and fireplaces for?" In a symbolic loss of childhood in the novel, Effi is called from her play in the garden to meet her future husband, Instetten. She is shown as a "child of the air," happy to be playing on the trapeze or the seesaw, a mass of contradictions between adulthood and childhood. She is unable to adapt to the adult life required of a Prussian matron and this brings about her ejection from that society, even at the cost of her contact with her child. The authors draw upon Balint's theories to explain the excitement that some adults experience in movement (ship, carousel, etc.). Balint attributed this to a mixture of fear, wonder, and hope in the face of a danger that is experienced and surmounted. He called such individuals "philobates" (lovers of motion). Balint related this to the first object relation in his theory of "primary love" and the discovery of the object world independent of the mother. Effi was a philobatic character. She remained a chid as Instetten's wife, searching for the philobatic pleasures of childhood in a grownup world. She sought childlike, philobatic thrills in the theme of the ghost that appears in the novel, and in her lover as well. Her retention of the dangerous letters was itself a philobatic thrillseeking.