With a quick movement he pulled the letter toward himself, but immediately pushed it away again.

The austere fervor that had lit up his face just a moment ago was extinguished, and his dangerous pet idea struck him as ridiculous. As though with a glance through a suddenly opened window he sensed what was really around him: the guns, the commerce of Europe. The notion that people who lived in this fashion could ever join together for a deliberate navigation of their spiritual destiny was simply impossible to conceive, and Ulrich had to admit that historical development had also never been the result of any planned association of ideas such as may, in a pinch, be possible in the mind of an individual, but was always prodigal in spirit and hence wasteful in effect, as if scattered onto the table by the fist of an uncouth gambler. He even felt a little ashamed. Everything he had thought in this hour was suspiciously reminiscent of a certain “Survey for the Drafting of a Guiding Resolution and to Ascertain the Wishes of Participant Circles of the Population,”^* and the very activity of moralizing, this theoretical way of thinking that observes nature by candlelight, struck him as utterly unnatural, unlike the operations of the simple man, who, accustomed to seeing things in the clear light of day, always reaches only for what is nearest at hand and never troubles himself with any question other than the particular one of whether his grasp will succeed in holding that object securely.

At this moment, Ulrich’s thoughts streamed back from generalities to himself, and he felt the importance of his sister. It was to her that he had shown that strange, unconditional, incredible, and unforgettable state in which everything is a yes. The state in which one is capable of no spiritual movement other than that of morality, and hence also the only condition in which there is a morality without interruption, even if it should only consist in all actions hovering groundlessly within it. And all that Agathe had done was reach out for this possibility. She was the person whose hand reaches out, and into the place of Ulrich’s reflections there now entered the bodies and forms of the real world.

Everything he had been thinking now appeared to him as mere delay and transition. He decided to “chance it” and see what would come of Agathe’s whim, and at this moment it was a matter of complete indifference to him that the mysterious promise it held had begun with what by ordinary standards was a disgraceful act. It remained to be seen whether the morality of “rising and sinking” would turn out to be as applicable to this state of affairs as the simple morality of honesty. And he remembered his sister’s passionate question of whether he himself believed what he was telling her; but even now he was as unable to answer it with a simple “yes” as he had been at the time. He admitted to himself that he was waiting for Agathe in order to answer this question.