Ulrich and his sister came to speak of this man again when they saw each other after Agathe’s sudden disappearance from the party at their cousin’s house they had attended together the night before. Ulrich had left the excited and quarrelsome gathering soon after she had, but had not been able to ask her why she had left him so abruptly; for she had locked her room and was either already sleeping or purposely ignoring the listener at her door with his hushed question as to whether she was still awake. Thus the day she had met with the curious stranger had closed as capriciously as it had begun. Nor was any information to be had from her in the morning. She herself did not know her true feelings. She had not been able to bring herself to read her husband’s letter again, even though now and then she saw it lying beside her. Thinking back to the morning when it had intruded into her life, it seemed incredible to her that hardly a day had passed since she had received it; so often had her condition changed in the meantime. Sometimes she thought the cliché “ghosts of the past” fit it perfectly; nevertheless, it really frightened her, too. And at times it merely aroused a small unease in her, such as one might feel at the unexpected sight of a stopped clock; but at other times she was plunged into fruitless brooding that the world from which this letter had come was claiming to be the real world for her. Something that did not even slightly touch her inside surrounded her outside as an invisible force, and it still held as firm as ever. Inadvertently, she compared this with the events that had transpired between her brother and herself since the arrival of this letter. These had been mainly conversations, and though one of them had even brought her to think of suicide, she had forgotten its subject, though likely enough it lay within her, waiting to come back to life. So it really did not matter what they had talked about, and when she weighed her heart-stirring present life against the letter, she had the impression of a deep, steady, incomparable, but powerless movement. From all this she felt partly faint and sobered, partly tender and restless, like a fever patient after his temperature has gone down.

In this state of animated helplessness, she suddenly said: “To empathize with another person to the point where one actually experiences how he feels must be incredibly hard!” To her surprise, Ulrich replied immediately: “There are people who imagine they can do that.” He said it in a tone that was both insinuating and ill-humored, and he had only half taken in what she had said. Her words had caused something to move aside and give way to an anger that had been left behind the day before. And so, notwithstanding that he really ought to find such resentment contemptible, that debate was over for the time being.