He thought it over once more. He mustered the schoolboys who had passed through his guiding hands, looking for a case that might cast a light on the matter; but before he was quite underway with this, there popped into his mind the missing piece in his deliberations that he had been looking for with vague discomfort. At this moment Agathe was for him no longer a purely individual case that could not be approached through a general rule; for when he considered how much she was prepared to give up without being blinded by any particular passion, he was led inescapably, and with delight, to the basic assumption, familiar to modern pedagogy, that she lacked the capacity for suprasubjective reflection and stable mental contact with her environment. Quickly he wrote: “Probably even now as you set about doing whatever it is you have in mind, you have only the vaguest idea of what it is; but I am warning you, before you make a lasting decision! You may well be the most extreme opposite of a self-knowing and life-oriented person such as myself, but just for that reason you should not thoughtlessly divest yourself of the support I am offering!”—Actually Hagauer had wanted to write something else. For human intelligence is not a self-enclosed and isolated faculty, its defects entail moral defects—hence the expression “moral idiocy”—just as moral flaws (though this is more rarely considered) may move the intelligence in whatever direction they choose, or blind it altogether! Thus Hagauer saw in his mind’s eye a distinct type that he was inclined to characterize, on the basis of conclusions already arrived at, as “an on the whole adequately intelligent variety of moral idiocy that expresses itself only in certain deficient forms of behavior.” But he could not bring himself to use this illuminating expression, partly because he wanted to avoid further provoking his runaway wife, partly because a layperson usually misunderstands such terms when they are applied to him- or herself. Factually, however, it had to be acknowledged that the objectionable manifestations belonged in the broad category of substandard mentality, and at last Hagauer hit on a way out of this tension between conscience and chivalry: by subsuming the irregularities in his wife’s behavior in a widespread pattern of female underperformance, he could classify them as social imbecility! Having formed this conception, he rounded off his letter in moving words. With the prophetic wrath of the scorned lover and pedagogue, he described Agathe’s asocial nature, so precariously lacking in a sense of community, as a “minus variant” that never grapples vigorously and creatively with the problems of life in the way that “our modern age” requires of “its people,” persisting instead in obstinate self-chosen isolation, “separated from life by a pane of glass,” constantly on the brink of pathological danger. “If there was something about me you didn’t like, you should have opposed it,” he wrote; “but the fact is that your mind is no match for the energies of our time and therefore dodges their demands! Having warned you about your character,” he concluded, “I repeat: You need reliable support more urgently than others do. In your own interest I urge you to come back immediately, and declare furthermore that the responsibility I bear as your husband forbids me to accede to your wish.”