Now Agathe asked with almost passionate insistence: “Why do you think it’s a questionable aspiration?”

Ulrich was silent. He even lit a cigarette to confirm that he was not going to answer; after all, they had talked about it enough the night before! Agathe knew this too. She did not want to provoke any new explanations. These explanations were as enchanting and as devastating as gazing into the sky and seeing cities of marble in gray, pink, and yellow clouds. She thought: “How lovely it would be if all he said was: ‘I want to love you as myself, and I can love you better that way than I can love any other woman, because you are my sister!’” And because he did not want to say that, she took a small pair of scissors and carefully cut off a thread that was sticking out somewhere, as if for the time being this were the single thing in the whole world that deserved her full attention. Ulrich watched with the same attention. She was at that moment more seductively present to all his senses than ever, and some of what she was hiding he was able to guess, though not everything. For meanwhile she had had time to come to this resolution: If Ulrich could forget that she herself was laughing at the stranger who presumed he could help her, he didn’t deserve to be reminded of it now. And besides, she had a hopeful presentiment about Lindner. She did not know him. But that he had offered to help her selflessly and with conviction must have inspired trust in her, for a joyous tonality of the heart, hard trumpet blasts of will, confidence, and pride, beneficently opposed to her own state, seemed to be sending their refreshing music from behind all the comedy of that encounter. “No matter how great difficulties may be, they amount to nothing if one meets them with an earnest will!” she thought, and was suddenly seized by remorse, so that she now broke the silence more or less the way one breaks off a flower so that two heads can bend over it, and added a second question to her first: “Do you still remember that you always said ‘love thy neighbor’ is as different from an obligation as a cloudburst of bliss is from a drop of satisfaction?”

She was astonished by the vehemence with which Ulrich answered her: “I’m not unaware of the irony of my situation. Since yesterday, and probably always, I have done nothing but rouse an army of reasons why this love of one’s neighbor is not a joy, but a hugely sublime, all but impossible undertaking! So nothing could be more understandable than your seeking protection from this with a man who hasn’t a clue about any of this, and in your position I would do the same.”

“But it’s not true at all that I’m doing that!” Agathe retorted curtly.

Ulrich could not help casting a glance at her that expressed as much gratitude as mistrust. “It’s hardly worth talking about,” he assured her. “I didn’t really want to bring it up.” He hesitated a moment and went on: “But look, given that one must love another person as one loves oneself, no matter how much one loves him it remains a deception and a self-deception, because one simply cannot feel with him how his head hurts, or his finger. It is absolutely unbearable that one cannot really share the experience of a person one loves, and it’s something utterly simple. This is how the world is arranged. We wear our animal skin with the hair inside and cannot shed it. And this terror in the midst of tenderness, this nightmare of perpetually thwarted communion—this is something the properly good, the ‘well and good’ people never experience. Their so-called empathy is actually a substitute to spare them the sense of a lack!”