And suddenly, as he felt himself swinging onto the streetcar, he said to himself: “I must impress this on Agathe: Morality is the subordination of every momentary state in our life to a single steady state!” This sentence had suddenly occurred to him in the form of a definition. But the overly polished and honed formulation had been preceded and followed by intuitions that, though less fully developed and articulated, enlarged his understanding. A rigorous conception and discipline for the harmless activity of feeling, an austere hierarchy of values, now appeared, vaguely foreshortened, in the prospective future: Feelings must either serve or belong to a state that extends to the ultimate and is as vast as the coastless sea, and that has not been described yet at all. Should that be called an idea, should it be called a longing? Ulrich had to let the matter rest, for at the moment when his sister’s name occurred to him, her shadow had darkened his thoughts. As always when he thought of her, he felt that in her company he had shown himself in a different frame of mind than usual. He also knew that he wanted passionately to return to that condition. But the same memory covered him with shame at having behaved in a presumptuous, ridiculous, intoxicated manner, no better than a drunk who throws himself to his knees in front of spectators whom he won’t be able to look in the face the next day. Given the temperate restraint that governed the siblings’ relationship, that was a grotesque overstatement, and if it was not completely unfounded, it was probably no more than a reaction to feelings that were as yet unformed. He knew that Agathe would be arriving in a few days, and he was putting no obstacles in her way. Had she actually done anything wrong? Conceivably she had gone back on it all when her mood cooled off. But a very vivid premonition assured him that Agathe had not abandoned her intention. He could have tried to find out from her. Once again he felt it was his duty to warn her in a letter. But instead of taking that impulse seriously for even a moment, he imagined what might have impelled Agathe to behave in such an unusual way: he saw it as an unbelievably vehement gesture meant to show her trust in him and to put herself in his hands. “She has very little sense of reality,” he thought, “but a wonderful way of doing what she wants. Rash, one could say; but just for that reason, not tepid! When she’s angry, she sees the world ruby red!” He smiled amicably and looked around at the people traveling with him. Every one of them had wicked thoughts, this could be taken for granted, and everyone suppressed them, and no one reproached himself unduly for having them: but no one had these thoughts outside himself, in a person who gives them the enchanting inaccessibility of a dreamed experience.