She did not know what gave her the right to reproach him in this way; her own life seemed so worthless to her that she really should have kept silent. But she drew her strength from Ulrich himself, and that was such a curiously feminine state, this leaning on him even as she attacked him, that he felt it too.

“You don’t understand the desire to combine ideas into large, articulated masses,” Ulrich said. “The combat experiences of the mind are unknown to you; all you see in them are columns marching in some kind of formation, the impersonal lockstep of many feet whirling up truth like a dust cloud!”

“But didn’t you yourself describe to me, more clearly and precisely than I ever could, the two states in which you can live?” she answered.

A glowing cloud with swiftly changing outlines passed over her face. She longed to bring her brother to a point where he could no longer turn back. The thought of it filled her with fervor, but she did not know yet whether she would have enough courage, and so she postponed finishing her meal.

All this Ulrich knew, he guessed it; but now he had roused himself and addressed her resolutely. Sitting opposite her with an absent gaze, forcing his mouth to speak, he had the impression that he was not really in himself but had been left somewhere behind himself and was now calling out to himself the words he was saying. “Imagine,” he said, “that while traveling it occurs to me to steal a stranger’s golden cigarette case. Now I ask you, isn’t that simply unthinkable?! So I don’t even want to discuss whether the kind of decision you have in mind can be justified on the grounds of some higher freedom of the mind. It may even be right to do Hagauer an injury. But imagine me in a hotel, neither penniless nor a professional thief, nor a mental defective with a deformed head or body, nor do I have a hysteric for a mother or a drinker for a father, nor am I confused or stigmatized by anything else, but I steal nonetheless: I tell you again, this is a case that does not exist anywhere in the world. It simply doesn’t happen! It can be ruled out with positively scientific certainty!”

Agathe laughed out loud: “But Ulo! What if one does it anyway?!”

Ulrich himself had to laugh at this answer, which he had not expected; he leapt to his feet and hastily pushed back his chair, for he did not want to encourage her with his compliance. Agathe rose from the table. “You can’t do this!” he begged her.

“But Uli,” she replied, “Do you think even when you dream, or do you dream that something is happening?”