At that moment Ulrich’s glance fell on his neighbor’s newspaper, and he read the bold headline of an advertisement: “Our Time Provokes Questions—And Answers Them”: it could have been a recommendation of a new arch support or a lecture, there’s really no way of telling these days, but his thoughts suddenly jumped into the track he needed. His companion made an effort to be objective: “Unfortunately,” she confessed hesitantly, “I don’t know much about literature, our like never has enough time. And maybe I haven’t even read the right things. But X, for instance”—she mentioned a popular name—“X is unbelievably rich for me. I find that when a writer can make us feel things so intensely, this is greatness!” However, since Ulrich felt he had already received enough benefit from Dr. Strastil’s combination of extraordinarily developed capacity for abstract thought with noticeably stunted emotional intelligence, he stood up cheerfully, gave his colleague an extravagant compliment, and hastily got off under the pretext of having already gone two stops too far. Standing on the street, he raised his hat to her once more, and Fräulein Strastil, remembering that she had recently heard disparaging remarks about his contributions, felt humanly moved by a wave of blood that had been aroused by his gracious parting words, an effect that to her way of thinking did not exactly speak for him; he, however, now knew, without yet quite knowing completely, why his thoughts were revolving around the subject of literature and what they were after, from the interrupted Mortadella comparison to the way he had unconsciously led good Dr. Strastil to make those confessions. After all, literature had ceased to be of any concern to him since he had written his last poem, at the age of twenty; even so, there had been a period before that when writing in secret had been a fairly regular habit, and he had given it up not because he had grown older or because he had realized he lacked sufficient talent, but for reasons that now, given his current impressions, he would most likely have characterized with a word that expresses a great deal of effort flowing into the void.