“That sounds like a martial code for archangels,” Agathe said, “but I can’t see that you’re right. I’ll walk with you a little way. You must explain to me how one can think as you do. Where are you going now?”

“I have to go home,” Lindner replied.

“Would your wife have something against my accompanying you to your house? We can take a cab in town. I still have time!”

“My son will be coming home from school,” Lindner said, fending her off with dignity. “We always eat punctually; that is why I must go home. My wife, by the way, died suddenly several years ago,” he said in correction of Agathe’s mistaken assumption, and with a glance at his watch he added, anxiously and annoyed: “I must hurry!”

“Then you must explain it to me another time, it’s important to me!” Agathe eagerly insisted. “If you won’t come to see us, I can look you up.”

Lindner gasped for air, but nothing came of it. Finally, he said: “But you as a woman can’t pay me a visit!”

“Yes, I can!” Agathe assured him. “You’ll see, one day I’ll show up. I don’t know when yet. And I assure you there’s no harm in it!”

With this she said goodbye and started down a path that diverged from his.

“You have no willpower!” she said under her breath, trying to imitate Lindner, but the word “will” was fresh and cool in her mouth. It evoked feelings like pride, toughness, confidence; a proud tonality of the heart. The man had done her good.

*“Ich bin Frau und heiße Hagauer”—“I am a woman” or “I am to be addressed as Frau” (in acknowledgment of her married status) “and my name is Hagauer”—involves both a subtle piquancy and an indication of Agathe’s inner divorcement from Hagauer that can’t be reproduced in English.

22

A CONVERSATION ON MORALITY

That same evening Ulrich attends a gala reception for the Parallel Cam­paign at his cousin Diotima’s house, where a large panoply of characters from The Man Without Qualities, along with a number of new ones—fashionable members of the social elite, pillars of industry and finance, influential journalists, military men, reputed possessors of literary genius, and elegant ladies—mingle and converse. Beneath the polite chatter an ideological polarity can be discerned, pitting those who trust in the good and pacific nature of man against those who hold that only the most modern weaponry and a strong leader can establish lasting peace. Agathe arrives late, and the siblings’ private conversation soon turns from her still unresolved legal predicament to the general subject of ethics. Morality, according to Ulrich, comes into being, like every other form of order, through force and compulsion; and if after centuries of social development the moral law seems to span all human life as autonomously as the vault of heaven, that sovereignty itself is without moral foundation: “Everything is moral, but morality itself is not moral.” His sister is not convinced.

“That is charming of morality,” Agathe said. “But do you know that I met a good man today?”