But whether this occasion was to present itself once again was apparently just the point toward which Lindner’s mental powers were so excitedly pressing. “There are many people with noble qualities that are just not yet concentrated in an adamant conviction,” he thought of saying to Agathe; but how should he do so if he did not see her again; and yet the thought that she might pay him a visit clashed with all his notions of chaste and tender womanhood. “One would have to confront her with it unequivocally, and right away!” he decided, and now that he had actually formed this resolution, he also no longer doubted that she would really come. He exhorted himself to selflessly endure with her the reasons she would submit to excuse her behavior before he went on to convince her of her errors. With unwavering patience, he would aim at the innermost core of her heart, and after he had envisioned that too, a noble feeling of fraternal vigilance and solicitude descended into his own heart, a consecration as between brother and sister, which he noted, should rest altogether upon the relations the sexes maintain with each other. “Hardly any men,” he cried out, uplifted, “have the slightest notion how deep a need noble feminine natures have for the noble man who consorts with the human being in the woman without being immediately unbalanced by coquetry and sexual allure!” These thoughts must have given him wings, for he did not know how he had got to the streetcar terminal, but suddenly there it was; and before stepping in, he took off his glasses in order to cleanse them of the mist with which the heat of his inner processes had coated them. Then he swung himself into a corner, glanced around the empty car, got his fare ready, looked into the conductor’s face, and felt quite on his mettle, ready to begin his return voyage on that admirable communal institution called the municipal streetcar. With a pleasurable yawn he discharged the fatigue of his walk, the better to ready himself for new duties, and summed up in one sentence the astonishing digressions to which he had abandoned himself: “Forgetting oneself is surely the healthiest thing a human being can do!”

24

THE DO-GOODER