Hagauer himself had felt as if all of what seemed intent on happening could not be true. After discharging his professional obligations, he had sat in the “deserted house” in the evening facing a blank sheet of paper, just as Ulrich had earlier, not knowing how to begin. But in Hagauer’s life the well-known “buttons technique” had proved successful more than once, and he resorted to it this time as well. It consists in taking a methodical approach to one’s thoughts, even when faced with an unsettling challenge, much as a man will have buttons sewn to his clothes because to assume that clothes can be removed from the body more quickly without buttons would actually entail a loss of time. The English author Surway, for instance, whose book on the subject Hagauer now consulted, because even in his distress it remained important to compare Surway’s views with his own, distinguishes five such buttons in a successful reasoning process: (a) observations of an event that immediately give rise to a sensation of difficulty in interpreting that event, (b) closer ascertainment and definition of these difficulties, (c) arriving at a conjecture as to a possible solution, (d) rational development of conclusions to be drawn from this conjecture, (e) further observations, leading to the acceptance or rejection of the hypothesis and thereby to the success of the reasoning process. Hagauer had already profitably applied a similar method to such a worldly subject as lawn tennis when he learned to play it at the Civil Service Club, and the game had acquired considerable intellectual charm for him as a result, but he had never yet made use of it in purely emotional matters; for his everyday affective life consisted largely of professional relations and, under more personal circumstances, of that “right feeling” that is a compound of all the feelings that are possible and in circulation among members of the white race in any given instance, with a certain premium on those that most nearly correspond with one’s locality, profession, and class. Applying the buttons to his wife’s extraordinary desire to divorce him was therefore not easy given his lack of practice, and as for the “right feeling,” it has a tendency to split in two where personal difficulties are concerned. It told Hagauer, on the one hand, that a man of the times like himself is obligated on many accounts not to put obstacles in the way of dissolving a relationship based on trust; but on the other hand, if one does not want a divorce, that same right feeling will also have a great deal to say that absolves one of such obligation, for the recklessness that has come to the fore in this domain can certainly not be condoned. In a case like his own, Hagauer knew, a modern man must “relax,” in other words disperse his attention, loosen up physically, and listen to whatever speaks to him from his innermost depths. Cautiously he put a halt to his deliberations, stared at the orphaned wall calendar, and listened into himself; and after a while a voice did indeed respond from a depth beneath his conscious mind, and told him precisely what he had already been thinking: that there was no reason why he should put up with anything so arbitrary as Agathe’s demand.