So it was not only while contemplating the capsule with the poison but every day that Agathe thought that she would like to die, or that the happiness of death must be something like the happiness in which she was spending these days while she was waiting to go and join her brother and meanwhile doing precisely what he had begged her to refrain from doing. She had no idea what would happen once she was with her brother in the capital. Almost reproachfully she remembered that from time to time he would casually intimate that he expected she would be successful there and soon find a new husband or at least a lover; but that was precisely how it was not going to be, this she knew! Love, children, happy days, lighthearted company, trips and a little art—: the good life was so simple, she understood and was not unresponsive to its appeal. But ready though she was to regard herself as useless, Agathe harbored all the born rebel’s contempt for such homespun simplicity. She recognized it as an imposture. The life supposedly lived to the full is in reality “without rhyme or reason,” and in the end, and truly at the real end, death, something is always missing in it. It is—she searched for a way to express it—like lots of things heaped together, instead of being ordered by a higher aspiration: unfulfilled in its fullness, the opposite of simplicity, just a jumble that one accepts with habitual pleasure! And suddenly going off on a tangent, she thought: “It’s like a crowd of unknown children you look at with conventional friendliness, filled with growing anxiety because you can’t find your own child among them!”

It calmed her that she had resolved to put an end to her life if the new turn that was still in store for her did not bring about a change. Like the fermentation in wine, there was a streaming anticipation in her that death and terror would not be the last word of truth. She felt no need to think about it. She even felt afraid of this need, to which Ulrich so readily yielded, and it was a belligerent fear. For she sensed that everything that took hold of her with such power was not entirely free of a persistent hint that it was merely an illusion. But it was just as certain that within the illusion there was a flowing, diffuse reality: perhaps a reality that had not yet become earth, she thought: and in one of those wonderful moments when the place where she stood seemed to dissolve into the unknown, she was able to believe that behind her, in the space one could never see, maybe God was standing. It was too much, and it frightened her. An immense vastness and emptiness suddenly flooded her, a shoreless radiance darkened her mind and instilled terror in her heart. Her youth—easily given to the anxieties of inexperience—whispered warnings that she was in danger of allowing an incipient madness to grow: She struggled to turn back. Fiercely she remonstrated with herself that she did not believe in God at all. And in fact she had not believed in God ever since she had been taught to do so—a subdivision of the mistrust she had developed toward everything she had been taught. She was not in the least religious in that concrete sense that suffices for an otherworldly or even just a moral conviction. But, exhausted and trembling, she had to admit after a while that she had felt “God” as clearly as she would a man standing behind her and placing a coat around her shoulders.