But at this point, Professor Hagauer’s mind was already unexpectedly confronted with buttons a to e in Surway’s or some equivalent series of buttons and freshly cognizant of the difficulties of interpreting the event under observation. “Am I, Gottlieb Hagauer,” Hagauer asked himself, “to blame for this embarrassing episode?” He examined himself and could not find a single fault in his own comportment. “Is the cause another man she’s in love with?” was his second surmise in the direction of a possible solution. But he found this assumption difficult to make, because when he forced himself to consider the question objectively, it was hard to imagine what another man could offer Agathe that was better than what he gave her. Nevertheless, as this question was more easily clouded by personal vanity than any other, he subjected it to the most exacting scrutiny and, in doing so, found vistas opening out that he had never considered, and suddenly Hagauer felt himself transported to point c in Surway’s scheme and on the trail of a possible solution via d and e: For the first time since his marriage, he was struck by a number of phenomena reported, as far as he knew, only in women whose love of the other sex is not in the slightest deep or passionate. It was painful for him that he could not find any evidence in his memory of that wide-open, dreamswept surrender he had become acquainted with earlier, during his bachelor years, in females about whose sensual way of life there could be no doubt, but whose example now offered him the advantage of being able to rule out, in complete scientific calm, the destruction of his matrimonial bliss by a third party. Thus Agathe’s behavior was automatically reduced to a purely idiosyncratic revolt against this happiness, all the more so because she had left without the slightest premonitory indication; and because in the short span of time that had elapsed since then no rationally motivated change of mind could have occurred, Hagauer came to the firm and final conclusion that Agathe’s incomprehensible conduct could only be explained as one of those gradually gathering temptations to deny life that are said to occur in personalities that do not know what they want.

But was Agathe’s nature really of that kind? This still remained to be investigated. Hagauer thoughtfully stroked his beard with the end of his pen. True, she did usually give the impression of being an “agreeable companion,” as he put it, but even when faced with matters that held the liveliest interest for him, she tended to show a marked indifference, not to say inertia! There was in fact something about her that was not in harmony with himself or with other people and their interests; it wasn’t contrariness; she always laughed or became serious at appropriate moments; but now that he thought about it, she had always, through all the years, given a somewhat distracted impression. She seemed to listen to whatever was being conveyed or explained to her, but she never seemed to believe it. Now that he thought about it more closely, her indifference seemed downright unhealthy. Sometimes one got the feeling that she was not aware of her surroundings at all . . . : And suddenly, before he himself knew it, his pen had begun to run swiftly, covering the page with his characteristically upright script. “Who knows what it is,” he wrote, “that makes you think you are too good to love the life I am in a position to offer you, and which I can say in all modesty is a pure and full life: you have always handled it as though with tongs, it seems to me now. You have denied yourself the riches of human and moral values that even a modest life has to offer, and even if I had to assume that there might have been something that made you feel justified in doing this, you would have shown yourself lacking in the moral will to effect a change and would have chosen an artificial and fantastical solution instead!”