“Is that all you have to say to me about it?” Agathe quietly asked.

“No, it isn’t,” Ulrich answered grimly: “If one has no reason, one must find one!”

Neither of them was in any doubt as to where they must look. But Ulrich was after something else, and after a brief span of silence he continued thoughtfully: “The moment you venture away from harmony with everyone else, you will for all eternity cease to know what is good and what is evil. So if you want to be good, you must be convinced that the world is good. And this neither of us are. We live in a time when morality is either disintegrating or going through convulsions. But for the sake of a world that may yet come, one must keep oneself pure!”

“Do you believe this has any influence on whether that world comes or not?” Agathe demurred.

“No, unfortunately I don’t believe that. At the most, the way I believe it is like this: If even the people who see this don’t act rightly, it will certainly not come, and the decay is unstoppable!”

“What’s in it for you if in five hundred years everything will be different, or not?”

Ulrich hesitated. “I do my duty, you see? Maybe like a soldier.”

Probably because on that unhappy morning Agathe was in need of a different and more affectionate consolation than Ulrich was giving her, she replied: “So in the end, you’re no different from your general?!”^*

Ulrich was silent.

Agathe was not inclined to stop. “But you’re not even sure it’s your duty,” she continued. “You do it because that’s the way you are and because you enjoy it. And that’s all I did!”

Suddenly she lost her self-control. Something in all this was very sad. All at once there were tears in her eyes, and a violent sob constricted her throat. In order to hide this from her brother, she threw her arms around his neck and hid her face against his shoulder. Ulrich could feel her weeping and the trembling of her back. An annoying embarrassment came over him: he felt himself turning cold. No matter how many tender and happy feelings he believed he had for his sister, at this moment, which should have touched him, these feelings were not there; his sensibility was distraught and immobilized. He stroked Agathe and whispered some words of consolation, but did so against strong resistance. And because he felt no reciprocal intellectual excitement in her, the contact of their two bodies seemed to him like that of two bundles of straw. He put an end to it by leading Agathe to a chair and sitting down in another chair at some distance from her. As he did that, he responded to what she had said: “You’re not enjoying the business with the will at all! And you never will, because it was a disorderly thing to do!”

“Order?” Agathe exclaimed through her tears. “Duty?!”

She was quite beside herself because Ulrich had behaved so coldly. But she was already smiling again. She realized that she would have to deal with herself unassisted. She felt the smile she had managed to produce hovering outside her, far from her icy lips. Ulrich, on the other hand, was now free of embarrassment; he was even pleased that he had not felt the usual physical responsiveness; it was clear to him that this too must be different between them. But he did not have time to think about it, for he saw that Agathe had been grievously affected, and so he began to talk. “Don’t be hurt by the words I used,” he begged her, “and don’t hold them against me! I’m probably wrong to choose words like “order” and “duty”; that really does sound like a sermon. But why,” he said, changing course, “why the devil are sermons contemptible? Shouldn’t they be our greatest joy?!”