His sister shook her head almost imperceptibly, but Ulrich noticed it. “Yes, really!” he insisted. “A poem should not be any more of an exceptional event than an act of kindness is! But, if I may ask this, what becomes of the elation the moment after? You love poetry, I know: but what I want to say is that it’s not enough to just have the scent of fire in one’s nostrils until it fades away. This fragmentary behavior is exactly equivalent to a morality that exhausts itself in half-baked criticism.” And suddenly returning to the main subject, he replied to his sister: “If my response to this Hagauer business were what you expect it to be today, then I should be skeptical, casual, and ironic. Then the doubtlessly very virtuous children that you or I may yet have would truthfully say of us that we belonged to a time of middle-class security that entertained no worries, except maybe useless ones. And yet we’ve gone to such great pains with our conviction!”

Ulrich probably wanted to say a great deal more; he was actually only preparing the plan of action he had in mind for his sister, and it would have been good if he had let her know that. For suddenly she stood up and on a vague pretext made herself ready to go outside.

“So it remains the case that I’m a moral imbecile?” she asked in a forced attempt to make a joke of it. “I can’t keep up with everything you’re saying to refute that!”

“We’re both moral imbeciles!” Ulrich assured her politely. “Both of us!” And he was somewhat annoyed by the haste with which his sister left him without telling him when she would come back.

*Agathe is referring to Ulrich’s loquacious friend General Stumm von Bordwehr, a member of the Parallel Campaign who occasionally visits Ulrich to apprise him of the most recent goings-on there.

21

AGATHE WANTS TO COMMIT SUICIDE AND MAKES THE ACQUAINTANCE OF A GENTLEMAN

Actually she had rushed off because she did not want once again to present her brother with the sight of tears she could scarcely restrain. She was as sad as a person who has lost everything. Why, she did not know. It had started while Ulrich was talking. Why, she did not know either. He should have done something other than talk. What, she did not know. He was right, of course, not to take seriously the “silly coincidence” of her agitation with the arrival of the letter, and to keep on talking in the way he always did. But Agathe had to run away.

At first she felt only a need to run. She ran headlong away from the house. Where the layout of the streets forced her to change course, she hurried on in that direction. She was fleeing; in the same way that animals and humans flee from a disaster. Why, she did not ask herself. Not until she got tired did she realize what she intended to do: Never to go back!