For the first time since he had left his letter unfinished, Ulrich realized that he no longer had to choose, and that he was already in the state he was still hesitant to enter. According to his laws—he allowed himself the arrogant ambiguity of calling them sacred—­Agathe’s error could not be repented but only be made good by succeeding developments—which, incidentally, corresponded to the original meaning of repentance, which is, after all, a purifying fire and not a state of corruption. To re-compense or in-demnify Agathe’s inconvenient husband would have meant nothing but a taking-back of damage done; in short, merely that double and paralyzing negation of which ordinary good behavior consists, which inwardly cancels itself out to zero. But to reduce to nothing what was going to happen to Hagauer, lift it from him, as it were, like a hovering load, would involve summoning up a great surge of feeling toward him, and that could not be contemplated without trepidation. Thus, according to the logic that Ulrich was seeking to embrace, all that could ever be made good was something other than the damage done, and he had not a moment’s doubt that this other was to be his and his sister’s whole life. “Putting it presumptuously,” he thought: “Saul did not make good each single consequence of his previous sins; he became Paul!” To this peculiar logic, however, feeling and conviction raised the habitual objection that it would be more decent, and in any case no deterrent to later exaltations, to straighten out accounts with one’s brother-in-law first and only then turn one’s sights on the new life. After all, the kind of morality that appealed to him so strongly was completely inadequate for the settling of financial affairs and the conflicts they give rise to. Unsolvable and contradictory problems were bound to turn up on the borderline between that other life and ordinary existence, so it was probably best not to let these develop into borderline cases but instead clear them away sooner rather than later in the normal, passionless way of ordinary decency. But here Ulrich felt again that one could not take one’s bearings from the normal requirements of goodness if one wanted to venture into the realm of unconditional goodness. The task imposed on him, to step into the unknown, seemed to brook no subtraction.