“As though the walls of a girl’s boarding school had risen up around me overnight, completely shutting me in!” he protested.

“Is that so terrible?” Agathe asked.

“I don’t know,” Ulrich replied.

Then he called her a carnivorous plant and himself a poor insect that had crawled into her luminous calyx. “You’ve closed it around me,” he said, “and now that, against my nature, I’ve become part of you, I’m sitting here surrounded by colors, perfume, and radiance, waiting for the males we’re going to attract!”

And the effect on him—given his concern to “find her a husband”—of witnessing the effect Agathe had on men was indeed rather strange. He was not jealous—in what capacity could he have been that?—and subordinated his own welfare to hers. What he wished for her was that a man worthy of her would soon free her from the state of transition her separation from Hagauer had placed her in: and nevertheless, when he saw her standing at the center of a group of men vying for her attention, or when on the street a man, attracted by her beauty and heedless of her escort, looked her in the eye, he did not know what to make of his feelings. Here too, since the simple way out—male jealousy—was forbidden to him, he often felt enclosed in a world he had never entered before. From his own experience he knew as much about male posturing as he did about women’s more guarded procedures in love, and when he saw Agathe exposed to the one and engaged in the other, he suffered; he felt as if he were attending the courtship of horses or of mice; the snorting and neighing, the pursing and spreading of lips with which strangers display their smugness and deference to each other filled him, observing it as he did without sympathy, with a faint disgust, like a dense anesthetic torpor spreading up from the depths of his body. And if nevertheless, in accordance with a deep emotional need, he put himself in his sister’s place, he was afterward not far from feeling, along with bewilderment at such acquiescence, the shame that a normal man feels when ap­proached under false pretenses by a man who is not. When he confessed this to Agathe, she laughed. “Well, there happen to be some women in our circle who are very interested in you,” was her answer.

What was going on here?

Ulrich said: “Basically it’s a protest against the world!”

And Ulrich said further: “You know my friend Walter: it’s been a long time since we liked each other; but even though he irritates me and I know that I get on his nerves as well, often at the mere sight of him I feel affection toward him, as if he and I were in perfect accord, which in fact we are not. Look, in life one understands so much without having come to an understanding with it; that’s why being in agreement with another person from the outset, before one has understood him, is as fabulously, beautifully senseless as when water streams into a valley from all sides in the spring!”