The morning had brought a rainy day and confined the siblings to their house. The leaves of the trees gleamed drearily outside the windows like wet linoleum; the pavement behind the gaps in the foliage was as shiny as a rubber boot. One’s eyes were almost loath to touch the wet view. Agathe regretted her remark and no longer knew why she had made it. She sighed and began again: “Today the world reminds me of the rooms we had as children.” She was referring to the bare upper rooms in their father’s house and the bemused reunion with them they had both celebrated. Perhaps that comparison was far-fetched; but she added: “It’s a person’s first sadness, surrounded by his toys, that comes back again and again!”

Unwittingly, after the recent period of sustained good weather, expectations had been directed toward another beautiful day, and this filled the mind with thwarted desire and impatient melancholy. Now Ulrich looked out of the window as well. Behind the gray, streaming wall of water, will-o’-the-wisps of outings never taken, fenceless meadows and an infinite world, danced and beckoned; and perhaps, too, a spectral wish to be alone some day and free again to move in any direction, the sweet pain of which is the story of the Passion and also already the Resurrection of love. He turned to his sister with something of this still in the expression of his face and body, and asked her almost fiercely: “I suppose I’m not one of those people who can respond empathically to others?”

“No, you really aren’t!” she replied, and smiled at him.

“But precisely what such people imagine,” he continued, for it was only now that he understood how seriously her words had been meant, “that one can suffer together, is as impossible for them as it is for anyone else. What they have, at best, is the skill nurses have at guessing what someone in need likes to hear.”

“In that case they must know what would help him,” Agathe objected.

“Not at all!” Ulrich asserted more stubbornly. “Probably the only comfort they give is by talking: someone who talks a lot discharges another person’s grief drop by drop, the way rain discharges the electricity in a cloud. This is the well-known alleviation of sorrow by talking!”

Agathe was silent.

“Maybe people like your new friend,” Ulrich now said ingenuously, “work the way some cough remedies do: they don’t get rid of a sore throat, but they soothe its irritation, and then it often heals by itself!”

In any other situation he could have expected his sister’s consent, but Agathe, who since yesterday had been strangely disposed because of her sudden weakness for a man whose worth Ulrich doubted, smiled implacably and toyed with her fingers. Ulrich jumped up and said urgently: “But I know him, even if it’s just a passing acquaintance: I’ve heard him lecture a few times!”

“You even called him a vapid fool,” Agathe interjected.

“And why not?” Ulrich defended it. “People like him know less than anyone how to empathize with another person. They don’t even know what it means. They simply don’t feel the difficulty, the enormously questionable nature of this aspiration!”