“He’s actually describing me very accurately,” she said with seeming equanimity but with a touch of provocation that clearly betrayed a wish to hear the opposite. “And even though he doesn’t explicitly say so, it’s true nonetheless: either I must have been non compos mentis when I married him for no compelling reason, or I am now, when I’m leaving him for just as little reason.”

Ulrich, who was reading for the third time those parts of the letter that made his imagination an involuntary witness of her close relationship with Hagauer, distractedly muttered something she could not make out.

“Please just pay attention,” Agathe requested. “Am I the economically or intellectually active, up-to-date woman? No. Am I the woman in love? I’m not that either. Am I the good, harmonizing, simplifying, nest-building helpmeet and mother? That least of all. So what is left then? What am I in the world for? The social circles we move in, I might as well tell you, basically mean nothing to me. And I almost think I could do without the music, literature, and art that educated people find so enchanting. Hagauer, for example, can’t do without them; he needs them, if only for his quotations and allusions. He at least always has at his fingertips the pleasure and orderliness of a collection. So is he not right when he reproaches me with not accomplishing anything, with denying myself ‘the wealth of the beautiful and the moral,’ and when he tells me the most I can still hope for is sympathy and tolerance from Professor Hagauer?!”

Ulrich handed her back the letter and replied calmly: “Let’s face it: You really are socially feebleminded!” He was smiling, but there was in his tone a hint of residual irritation from having looked into this intimate letter.

But Agathe did not appreciate her brother’s answer. It made her feel worse. Shyly, she mocked him in turn: “Why then, if that is the case, did you insist, without telling me anything, that I get divorced and lose my only protector?”

“Oh,” Ulrich said evasively, “probably because it’s so beautifully easy to adopt a firm manly tone with another man. I banged my fist on the table, he banged his fist on the table; and of course then I had to bang twice as hard: I think that’s why I did it.”

Up to now, though her depression prevented her from realizing it, Agathe had been very glad, indeed wildly elated, that her brother had secretly done the opposite of what he had professed to be doing during the time of their playfully flirtatious brother-and-sister game; for offending Hagauer could only have one purpose: to set up a barrier behind her that would make it impossible for her to return. But now, even here in this place of hidden joy, there was only a hollow sense of loss, and Agathe fell silent.

“We must not overlook,” Ulrich continued, “how well Hagauer manages in his own way to misunderstand you with, I’m tempted to say, point-blank accuracy. Watch out, he may yet, in his own fashion, without hiring a detective, merely by starting to think about the weaknesses in your relationship with the human race, ferret out what you did with Father’s will. How are we going to defend you then?”