They were alone for a moment, and Agathe hastily added: “I looked at that passage carefully. Only a few words need to be changed, then it looks as if the obligatory inheritance was already paid out to me earlier. Who knows anything about it now?! When Papa went back to leaving us equal shares after our aunt’s losses, it was put in a codicil, which can be destroyed; besides, who’s to say I couldn’t have waived my legal share to leave it to you for some reason!”

Ulrich looked at his sister dumbfounded and missed his chance to counter her inventions as he felt duty-bound to do; by the time he was ready, they were no longer alone, and he had to veil his words:

“One really shouldn’t,” he began hesitantly, “even think such things!”

“Why not?” Agathe retorted.

Such questions are very simple when they are at rest; but as soon as they rear their heads, what was previously a harmless-looking smudge becomes a monstrous serpent: Ulrich remembered answering: “Even Nietzsche obliges ‘free spirits’ to respect certain outer rules for the sake of inner freedom!” He had said it with a smile, but at the same time with the feeling that it was cowardly to hide behind someone else’s words.

“That’s a lame principle!” Agathe curtly determined. “I was married according to this principle!”

And Ulrich thought: “It really is a lame principle.” It seems that people who have new and revolutionary answers to particular problems strike a balance by making a compromise with everything else, which allows them to live a respectable morality in slippers; the more so as such an approach, which aims at keeping all conditions constant except for the one that is to be changed, corresponds entirely to the creative economy of thought they are at home with. Ulrich himself had always regarded this as a rigorous rather than lax way of going about things, but when that conversation took place between himself and his sister, he felt she had touched a nerve; he could no longer bear the undecidedness he had loved, and it seemed to him it was precisely Agathe’s mission to bring him to this point. And while he nonetheless continued to expostulate with her about the “rule of free spirits,” she laughed and asked him whether he didn’t notice that the moment he tried to set up general rules, a different man stepped into his place.

“And even though I’m sure you’re right to admire him, basically you couldn’t care less about him,” she asserted, giving her brother a willful and challenging look. Again he felt himself prevented from answering her and remained silent, expecting an interruption at any moment, yet he couldn’t make up his mind to break off the conversation. This situation gave her courage. “In the short time we’ve been together,” she continued, “you have given me such wonderful advice about how I should live, things I would never have dared to imagine on my own, but then, every time, you’ve asked whether what you said was really true! It seems to me that the truth, the way you use it, is a force that abuses people!”