He smiled contentedly and carried that thought forward with the observation that Agathe and he both stood in a special kind of contrast to Hagauer that could be roughly described as that of people who are bad in a good way to a man who is good in a bad way. If one leaves out of account the great middle range of life, which is, reasonably enough, occupied by people in whose thinking the general terms “good” and “evil” have simply ceased to occur ever since they let go of their mothers’ apron strings, then the marginal strata, where deliberate moral efforts still exist, are indeed left to such bad-good and good-bad people, of which the former have never seen the good fly or heard it sing and therefore call on all their fellow men to share their enthusiasm for a moral landscape where stuffed birds perch on lifeless trees; whereupon the latter, the good-bad mortals, vexed by their rivals, assiduously cultivate at least in their thoughts a penchant for evil, as though they were convinced that only in bad deeds, which are not quite as shopworn as the good ones, some tremulous remnant of moral vitality still survives. And so—of course without Ulrich’s being quite conscious of this foreknowledge—the world at that time had the choice between being ruined either by its lame morality or by its nimble immoralists, and probably still does not know which of the two it finally decided on with overwhelming success; unless, perhaps, the teeming many, who never have time to concern themselves with morality in general, did concern themselves with it in one particular instance, because they had lost confidence in the state of the world they lived in and of course subsequently lost a number of other things as well. For bad-bad people, whom one can so easily blame for everything, were as rare then as they are now, and the good-good represented an ideal as remote as a distant nebula. But it was precisely of them that Ulrich was thinking, while everything else he appeared to be thinking about was a matter of complete indifference to him.