Two days later, toward evening, Ulrich sat down at his desk and began writing a letter to Agathe.

It was clear to him—as light and clear as a windless day can sometimes be—that her ill-considered venture was extremely dangerous; what had happened so far could still be regarded as a risky bit of foolishness that concerned only the two of them, but this depended completely on its being undone before it gained relationships with reality, and the danger was growing with each passing day. Ulrich had written thus far when he stopped, feeling uneasy at the thought of entrusting to the mail a letter that discussed this in undisguised terms. He told himself that it would be more suitable in every way if he himself went with the next train instead of the letter; but of course that also made little sense, since he had let days go by without doing anything about the matter, and then he knew he would not go.

He noticed there was something beneath these vacillations that was almost as firm as a resolution: he felt like simply letting things take their course and waiting to see what would come of the incident. So the problem he was faced with was merely that of determining to what extent and how consciously he could really want this, and now all sorts of far-ranging thoughts went through his head.

Right at the start he made the observation that until now, whenever he conducted himself “morally,” he always found himself in a less resourceful state than when he was doing or thinking something one would usually call “immoral.” This is a universal phenomenon: for when people are brought into conflict with their surroundings, they deploy all their faculties, while in situations where they are merely doing their duty they understandably behave no differently than while paying their taxes; from which we may conclude that everything bad is carried out with some degree of imagination and passion, whereas the good is distinguished by an unmistakably joyless and affectless demeanor. Ulrich remembered that his sister had expressed this moral predicament very ingenuously by asking whether being good was no longer good. It ought to be difficult and breathtaking, she had claimed, and wondered at the fact that moral people nevertheless were almost always boring.