Dr. Strastil was indeed going to the mountains for three days of “recreation.” “What do you think of Koniatowski’s paper?” she asked Ulrich. Ulrich said nothing. “It will infuriate Kneppler,” she said. “But Koniatowski’s critique of Kneppler’s deduction from Danielli’s Theorem is interesting, don’t you agree? Do you think this deduction is tenable?”

Ulrich shrugged. He was one of those mathematicians, called logicians, for whom nothing was ever correct and who were building a new fundamental theory. But he considered the logicians’ logic to be not quite right either. Had he continued his work, he would have fallen back on Aristotle; he had his own views about that.

“Even so, I don’t think Kneppler’s deduction is off the mark, it’s just wrong,” Dr. Strastil confessed. She could just as well have emphasized that she considered the deduction to be off the mark but nevertheless, in its basic tenets, not wrong; she knew what she meant, but in ordinary language, where words are not defined, no one can express himself unequivocally: as she made use of this vacation language, something beneath her sightseer’s hat stirred with the kind of nervous hauteur that might be aroused in a cloistered monk when he carelessly comes into contact with the sensual world of the laity.

Ulrich got into the streetcar with Fräulein Strastil: he didn’t know why. Maybe because Koniatowski’s critique of Kneppler seemed so important to her. Maybe he wanted to talk with her about literature, which she knew nothing about. “What will you do in the mountains?” he asked.

She wanted to climb the Hochschwab.

“There’ll still be too much snow there,” he said, for he knew the mountains. “It’s too late to get up there on skis, and too early to go up without them.”

“Then I’ll stay at the bottom,” Fräulein Strastil declared. “I once spent three days in one of the huts at the foot of the Färsenalm. All I want is a bit of nature!”

The face this worthy astronomer made while pronouncing the word “nature” provoked Ulrich to ask what it was that nature had to offer her.

Dr. Strastil was sincerely indignant. She could lie on that pasture for three days straight without moving: “Like a boulder!” she proclaimed.

“That’s only because you’re a scientist!” Ulrich interjected. “A peasant would be bored!”

Dr. Strastil did not agree. She spoke of the thousands who sought nature every holiday on foot, on wheels, or by boat.

Ulrich spoke of rural migration, the peasants’ attraction to city life.

Fräulein Strastil doubted that he was feeling at a sufficiently elemental level.

Ulrich asserted that the only elemental requirement, next to food and love, was comfort, not a trek to an Alpine meadow. The supposedly natural feeling that drove people to do such things, he said, was a modern Rousseauism, a complicated and sentimental attitude. He did not feel that he was expressing himself well at all, he did not care what he was saying, he only went on speaking because it was still not whatever it was he wanted to bring out from within himself. Fräulein Strastil cast a mistrustful glance at him. She could not make him out; her great experience with abstract concepts was not of the slightest use to her, she could neither distinguish nor fit together the notions he seemed to be merely tossing around with a certain alacrity; she assumed he was talking without thinking. That she was listening to such words with a grouse feather in her hat was her only satisfaction and increased the pleasure with which she looked forward to her solitary retreat.