“I was as nothing to you all” were the words the life-weary poet had asked to be inscribed on his tombstone, and it occurred to Agathe that they could apply to her too. This thought, by the edge of a forest lookout, above the verdant vineyards and the alien, immeasurable city with its slowly stirring plumes of smoke in the morning sun, moved her once again. On a sudden impulse, she kneeled down and leaned her forehead against one of the stone pillars to which the chains were attached; the unaccustomed position and the cool touch of the stone conjured up for her the somewhat rigid and will-less peace of the death that awaited her. She tried to collect herself. But she did not succeed right away: birdcalls intruded into her hearing; she was surprised by how many different birdcalls there were; branches moved, and as she did not feel the wind, it seemed to her that the trees themselves were moving their branches; in a sudden hush, a faint scurrying could be heard; the stone she was resting her forehead against was so smooth that it felt as if there were a piece of ice between her skin and the stone that kept her from quite reaching it. Only after a while did she know that what was distracting her was the very thing she was trying to recall, that fundamental sense of being utterly superfluous, which, reduced to its simplest terms, could only be expressed with the words that life was so complete without her that she had no business meddling with it. This cruel feeling was at bottom neither despairing nor aggrieved; rather, it was a listening and a watching that Agathe had always known, now merely devoid of any impulse, indeed any chance, to include herself. There was almost a quality of being sheltered in this banishment, just as there is an awe that forgets to ask questions. She could just as well go away. But where? There had to be some place, somewhere. Agathe was not one of those people in whom even a conviction of the vanity of all imaginings can take the form of a kind of satisfaction akin to belligerent or spiteful austerity as a way of accepting one’s unsatisfactory lot. She was generous and incautious in such matters and not like Ulrich, who put every conceivable difficulty in the way of his feelings, in order to disallow them if they did not pass the test. She was stupid! That was it, she told herself. She did not want to think things through. Defiantly she pressed her deeply lowered brow against the iron chains, which gave a little and then firmly resisted. In these last weeks she had somehow begun to believe in God again, but without thinking of Him. Certain states in which the world had always seemed different to her from the way it appears, and in such a way that she too was no longer shut out but entirely flooded by a radiant conviction, had almost, under Ulrich’s influence, been brought close to an inner metamorphosis and a complete transformation. She would have been prepared to conceive of a God who opens his world like a hiding place. But Ulrich said this was not necessary, it could only do harm to imagine more than one could experience. And it was up to him to decide such things. But then he must also guide her without abandoning her. He was the threshold between two lives, and all the longing she felt for one of them, and all her flight from the other, led to him first. She loved him as shamelessly as one loves life. When she opened her eyes in the morning, it was he who awoke in all her limbs. Even now he was looking at her from the dark mirror of her anguish: And only at this moment did Agathe remember that she wanted to kill herself. She had the feeling that to spite him she had run away from home to God when she left the house with the resolve to kill herself. But now that resolve seemed to be exhausted and to have sunk back to its source, which was that Ulrich had hurt her. She was angry at him, that feeling was still with her, but the birds were singing, and she heard them again. She was just as bewildered as before, but now joyfully bewildered. She wanted to take some kind of action, but it should be directed at Ulrich, not just at herself. The infinite torpor in which she had lain on her knees gave way to the warm and lively sensation of blood streaming into her limbs as she rose to her feet.