“In that case you must not object to my visiting you,” Agathe continued, ignoring his reluctance. “I need some advice.” And since he had been addressing her as Fräulein, she added: “I’m married. My name is Hagauer.”^*

“Could it be, then,” Lindner exclaimed, “that you are the wife of that accomplished educationalist, Professor Hagauer?”

He had begun the sentence on a note of sheer delight and ended it in a hesitant, muted register. For Hagauer was two things: he was an educationalist, and he was a progressive educationalist; Lindner was actually opposed to his ideas, but how bracing it is when, in the unsteady mists of a female psyche, moments after she has conceived the impossible whim of visiting a stranger in his house, one discerns such a familiar enemy; it was the drop from the second to the first of these sentiments that was echoed in the tone of his question.

Agathe had noticed it. She did not know if she should tell Lindner what the status of her relationship with her husband was. Telling him might put an immediate end to everything between herself and this new friend: she had that impression very clearly. And she would have been sorry; for precisely because there was much about Lindner that provoked her to mock him, he also made her feel she could trust him. The impression, credibly supported by his appearance, that this man seemed to want nothing for himself strangely compelled her to be sincere: he put all desire to rest, and then sincerity rose unprompted of its own accord. “I’m about to get a divorce,” she finally admitted.

A silence followed; Lindner looked despondent, and Agathe now found him just a bit too pathetic.

Finally, Lindner said with an aggrieved smile: “I already thought it might be something like that when I first saw you!”

“Don’t tell me you’re an enemy of divorce as well?!” Agathe cried, giving free rein to her annoyance. “Of course, how could you not be! But you know, you’re really a little behind the times!”

“At least I don’t think it’s as unquestionable as you do,” Lindner pensively said in defense, took off his glasses, polished them, put them on again, and contemplated Agathe.

“I think you have too little willpower,” he concluded.

“Willpower? My will is precisely to get a divorce!” Agathe exclaimed, well aware that she was missing the point.

“That is not the sense in which I am using this term,” Lindner gently corrected her. “I’m prepared to believe that you have good reasons. I just happen to think differently: the free and easy morals people allow themselves nowadays never amount to more, in practice, than a sign that an individual is immovably chained to his ego and not capable of living and acting from a wider perspective. Our gentle poets,” he added jealously, attempting a jibe at Agathe’s impassioned pilgrimage that turned slightly sour in his mouth, “who flatter the sensibilities of the ladies, for which the ladies overrate them in return, are of course in an easier position than I am when I tell you that marriage is an institution of responsibility and mastery over the passions! But before an individual divests himself of the external safe­guards that the human race has erected in true self-knowledge against its own unreliability, he would do well to tell himself that isolation from and disobedience to the higher totality constitute worse damage than the body’s disappointments we are so afraid to countenance!”