And while Ulrich continued to walk behind the woman, in reality afraid that she might stop in front of a shopwindow and force him to either stumble foolishly past her or start up a conversation, something inside him was still undistracted and wide awake. “I wonder what Agathe actually wants from me?” he asked himself for the first time. He did not know. He assumed it must be similar to what he wanted of her, but his reasons for thinking that were purely emotional. Wasn’t it rather astonishing how quickly and unexpectedly it had all happened? Except for a few childhood memories, he had known nothing about her, and the little he had heard, for instance about her connection with Hagauer over several years, had not disposed him favorably toward her. Now he also remembered the peculiar hesitation, almost reluctance, with which he had approached his father’s house on the day of his arrival. And suddenly the idea embedded itself in his mind: “My feeling for Agathe is nothing but imagination!” In a man who constantly wanted something other than his surroundings, he thought, now in a serious vein again, in such a man, who always only gets to feel dislike and never arrives at liking, the usual “humane” combination of goodwill and lukewarm kindliness must disintegrate into a cold hardness with a mist of impersonal love hovering above it. Seraphic love, he had once called it. Or, he thought, one could also say: love without a partner. Or just as well: love without sex. Nowadays people only loved in sexual terms: those of the same sex couldn’t abide each other, and in the cross-pollination from one sex to another, mutual love went along with a growing revolt against the overestimation of this compulsion. But seraphic love was free of both of these. It was love liberated from the countercurrents of social and sexual aversions. This love, which could be sensed everywhere side by side with the cruelty of contemporary life, could truly be called the sisterly love of an age that has no room for brotherly love, he told himself, wincing in irritation.

But even though these were his thoughts in the end, alongside them and intermittently he dreamed of a woman who cannot be attained at all. His vision of her was like late autumn days in the mountains, where the air is as if drained of its blood and dying, but the colors burn with the fiercest intensity of passion. He saw the blue vistas extending without end in mysteriously rich gradations. He completely forgot the woman who was walking in front of him, was far from all desire and perhaps near to love.

He was distracted only by the lingering gaze of another woman, who resembled the first one though she was neither brash nor fleshy, but well-bred and delicate like a pastel stroke, which nonetheless impresses itself in a fraction of a second: He looked up and in a state of utter inner exhaustion beheld a very beautiful lady in whom he recognized Bonadea.^*