“This question is much too frivolously posed,” Ulrich grumbled. But Agathe knew how he would judge it in his “second way of thinking.” She took a clean sheet of paper and cheerfully wrote in the old-fashioned script she was so good at imitating: “My bad daughter Agathe provides no reason for changing the above provisions to the disadvantage of my good son Ulrich!” Not yet satisfied with this, she wrote on a second sheet: “My daughter Agathe is to be educated by my good son Uli for some time.”

• • •

So that was how it had happened, but after Ulrich had resurrected it with all its details, he ended up knowing just as little what to do as he had before he began.

He should not have left without straightening the situation out: no doubt about that! And obviously the present-day superstition that one must not take anything too seriously had played a trick when it prompted him to withdraw for the time being and not increase the value of that contentious episode with sentimental resistance. Things are never as bad as they seem; the most overblown situations, left to themselves, eventually level off to a new mediocrity; you couldn’t board a train or walk in the street without having a loaded gun at the ready if you couldn’t count on the law of averages, which automatically makes extreme possibilities improbable: this was the European faith in empirical knowledge that Ulrich had obeyed when, despite all his scruples, he had taken the trip home. At bottom he was even glad that Agathe had shown a different side of herself.

All the same, the conclusion of this matter, if it was to be legally unimpeachable, could only be that Ulrich now, and without delay, make up for what he had neglected. He ought to have sent his sister an immediate special delivery letter or telegram, and he realized it should have said something like, “I refuse to have anything to do with you unless. . . !” But he was not at all minded to write anything of the kind; it was simply impossible for him to do so at the moment.