Ulrich was taken aback by this interruption, but when Agathe started telling him about her meeting with Lindner, he first tried to find a place for it in his train of thought. “You can find good people here by the dozen as well,” he said, “but I’ll show you why the bad ones cannot fail to be among them, if you’ll let me continue.”

As they talked, they tried to get away from the party’s commotion and had reached the anteroom, where they remained for the time being among the uninhabited coats that were hanging in the lobby. Ulrich could not find a way to resume his thoughts. “I really should start again from the beginning,” he said with an impatient and helpless gesture. And suddenly he said: “You don’t want to know whether you’ve done something good or bad; rather you are unsettled by the fact that you do both without any solid reason.”

Agathe nodded.

He had taken both her hands in his.

The faint glow of his sister’s skin, with its fragrance of plants unknown to him rising from her slight décolleté, lost for a moment all earthly conception. The thrust of the blood throbbed from one hand to the other. A deep moat of unworldly origin seemed to enclose her and him in a nowhereland.

He suddenly lacked the ideas to describe it. He could not even find formulations he had often made use of before. “We don’t want to act out of the intuition of particular moments, but out of the state that endures to the end.” “In such a way that it takes us to the center from which one cannot return to take anything back.” “Not from the periphery with its constantly changing conditions, but out of the one, immutable happiness.” Such phrases did come to his lips, and he might well have found it possible to use them if it were just a matter of conversation. But applying them to the immediacy of this moment between him and his sister was suddenly impossible. This left him helplessly agitated. But Agathe understood him clearly. And it should have made her happy that for the first time the shell encasing her “hard brother” had cracked open entirely, exposing what was inside, like an egg that had fallen to the floor. To her surprise however, her feelings this time were not quite ready to go along with his. Between the morning and the evening lay her curious encounter with Lindner, and although this man had merely aroused wonderment and curiosity in her, even that small grain was enough to prevent the infinite mirroring of eremitic love from coming into being.

Ulrich felt it in her hands even before she responded, and Agathe—did not respond.

He guessed that this unexpected self-renunciation had something to do with the experience he had been obliged to hear about moments ago. Abashed and confused by the rebound of his unreciprocated emotion, he said, shaking his head: “It really is annoying how much you seem to expect from the goodness of such a man.”