Since he also valued the virtue of modesty, he would at no other time have made such a pronouncement in regard to himself, but Agathe had aroused such a tumult in the blood! Then again, his emotions were negatively grounded, as it were, in the knowledge that this divinely tender female he had found in tears, as the angel had found the maiden in the dew—oh, he did not want to be presumptuous, and yet how presumptuous indulging in poetry makes one!—and so he continued in a more severe manner: that this miserable woman was on the verge of breaking an oath placed in the hands of God; for that was how he regarded her desire for a divorce. Regrettably, he had not impressed this upon her with the necessary resoluteness when they were standing face-to-face—God, what nearness again in these words!—no, he had not said it strongly enough; he merely remembered talking to her in general terms about loose morals and ways of protecting oneself against them. The name of God, by the way, had certainly not passed his lips when they spoke, except maybe as an empty figure of speech; and the casualness, the candid—one was tempted to say disrespectful—seriousness with which Agathe had asked him if he believed in God offended him even now as he remembered it. For a truly devout person does not permit himself to simply follow a whim and think about God in a crude, direct way. Indeed, the moment Lindner recalled this impertinence, he detested Agathe as if he had stepped on a snake. He resolved that if he should ever be in the position of repeating his admonitions to her, he would definitely employ only the powerful language of reason, which is suitable to earthly concerns and exists in the world so that not every ill-bred person may trouble God with his long-established confusions; and so he began to employ reason straightaway, and many a phrase occurred to him that might be offered to a woman who has stumbled. For example, that marriage is not a private affair but a public institution; that it has the sublime mission of developing feelings of responsibility and empathy, and the task, so conducive to strengthening a nation’s mettle, of training the individual to countenance even the greatest difficulties; perhaps indeed, though this could only be advanced with the greatest discretion, that precisely by lasting a fairly long time, marriage also constitutes the best protection against the limitlessness of desire. He had an image of humanity, perhaps not wrongly, as a sack full of devils that had to be firmly tied shut, and he saw unshakable principles as the tie. How this sympathetic man, whose corporeal part could not be said to have exceeded its bounds in any direction but height, had arrived at the conviction that one must constrain oneself at every step was indeed a riddle, which could only be easily solved if one knew its benefit. When he had already reached the foot of the hill, a train of soldiers crossed his path, and he looked with tender commiseration at the sweat-soaked young men, who had pushed their caps back on their heads and, with faces dulled by exhaustion, looked like a procession of dusty caterpillars. At their sight, his revulsion at the frivolity with which Agathe had treated the question of divorce was dreamily softened by joy that such a thing was happening to his freethinking colleague Hagauer, and this stirring, though not commendable, at least served to remind him how indispensable it was to mistrust human nature. He therefore resolved to make uncompromisingly clear to Agathe—should the occasion actually, and without any fault of his own, present itself again—that in the end the forces of self-interest have only a destructive effect, and that she must subordinate her personal despair, however great it might be, to the moral insight that the true touchstone of life is found in living together.