This question reminded him of the assertion he had made a few days ago, that all the demands of morality point to a kind of dream state that has fled by the time they are formulated. But Agathe had already gone into her father’s study, which could now be seen, lamp lit, behind two opened doors, and Ulrich, who had not followed her, saw her standing in this frame. She was holding a sheet of paper to the light and reading it. “Does she have any idea what she is taking upon herself?” he wondered. But none of the diagnostic keys that were in current use, such as nervous inferiority, neurological deficit, emotional debility and the like, seemed to fit, and in the lovely picture Agathe presented while committing her crime not a trace of greed or vengefulness or any other inner ugliness could be seen. And though with the aid of such concepts even the actions of a criminal or semipsychotic would have seemed relatively tame and civilized to Ulrich, for there the distorted and displaced motives of ordinary life glimmer in the depths, his sister’s gently savage resoluteness, in which purity and crime were indistinguishably mixed, had a stunning effect on him. He was unable to accommodate the thought that this person, who was about to commit a bad act, could be a bad person, and had to watch while Agathe took one paper after another from the desk, read it, and placed it aside as she earnestly searched for a specific document. Her determination gave the impression of having descended from another world to the plane of ordinary decisions.

As he made these observations, Ulrich was additionally disturbed by the question of why he had talked Hagauer into leaving without suspecting anything. It seemed to him that he had acted from the start as an instrument of his sister’s will, and to the very last, even when he contradicted her, he had given her answers that helped her to move forward. The truth abuses people, she had said: “Very well put, but she has no idea what truth means!” Ulrich mused. “With advancing years, it gives you the gout; when you’re young it’s all hunting and sailing.” He had sat down again. Suddenly it struck him that not only had Agathe somehow got from him what she said about truth, but also that what she was doing in the room next door was something for which he had prepared the outlines. Hadn’t he said that in the highest state attainable to man there is no good and evil but only faith and doubt? That inflexible rules are inimical to the innermost nature of morality and that faith must never be more than an hour old? That in the state of faith it is not possible to do anything base? That intuition is a more passionate state than truth? And now Agathe was about to leave the sanctuary of moral constraint and venture into that boundless depth where the only choice is that between rising and sinking. She was carrying out her plan in the same way as, earlier, she had taken the medals from his hesitant hand in order to exchange the originals for the replicas, and at this moment he loved her despite her lack of conscience with the strange feeling that his own thoughts had gone from him to her and were now returning from her to him, having become poorer in deliberation but all the more redolent of the balsamic scent of freedom, like a creature of the wild. And trembling from the effort to restrain himself, he cautiously made a suggestion: “I will stay another day and consult a notary or a lawyer. What you’re doing may be terribly transparent!”