Whatever the relationship between things and feelings in the mature weltanschauung of civilized man may be, everyone knows those moments of ardor in which a split has not yet occurred, as though the waters had not yet been divided from the land and the waves of feeling still shared the same horizon with the heights and valleys that form the appearance of things. One need not even assume that Agathe experienced such moments unusually often or with uncommon intensity; she just apprehended them more vividly, or if one prefers, more superstitiously, for she was always prepared to believe the world and then again not to believe it, just as she had done since her school days, nor had she unlearned this habit after coming into closer contact with the logic of men. In this sense, which is far removed from whim and caprice, Agathe, had she been more self-confident, would have been entitled to claim that she was the most illogical of women. But it had never occurred to her to regard the averted feelings she experienced as more than a personal idiosyncrasy. It was only the encounter with her brother that brought about a change in her. In those cavernous rooms, hollowed out in the shadows of solitude and just recently filled with talk and a fellowship that touched the innermost core of the soul, the distinction between physical separation and spiritual presence fell away, and as the days glided along without a mark or a trace, Agathe felt, more intensely than ever before, the peculiar attraction of omnipresence and omnipotence that arises when the felt world crosses over into the world of perceptions. Her attention now seemed to be not with the senses but wide open deep within her heart, which could and would not receive anything as true that did not shine with the same radiance as its own, and as she remembered the words she had heard from her brother, she reckoned that, in spite of the ignorance of which she usually accused herself, she understood everything that mattered without having to think about it. And now that her spirit was so filled with itself that even the liveliest insight had something of the soundless floating quality of a memory, everything that came her way expanded into a limitless presence; even when she did something, all that actually happened was that some difference between herself as the agent and the act that was being performed melted away, and her movement seemed to be the path by which things came toward her of themselves when her arm reached out to them. But this gentle power, her knowing, and the speaking presence of the world were, when she smilingly asked herself what she was doing, hardly distinguishable from a complete absence of power and a wordless silence of the mind. With only a slight exaggeration of what she was experiencing, Agathe could have said that she no longer knew where she was. On all sides she was in a state of suspension in which she felt herself to be simultaneously lifted up and vanished from the scene. She might have said: I am in love, but I don’t know with whom. She was filled with a clear will, which she had always felt a lack of, but she could not imagine what she could possibly do in this clarity, for all the good and evil there had been in her life had no meaning.