Shaken about among people who were like rough, wet pieces of laundry, she found it hard to keep her web of reveries intact, for she wanted to bring it to Lindner. But she managed to protect it from tearing and withstood the ride with a determined face. She even belittled it, reducing its size, as it were. Her entire relation to God, if this name should even be applied to such adventurousness, was limited to a kind of twilight that opened up when her life became too oppressive and repulsive or, and this was new, too beautiful. Into that space she would then run, searching. That was all she could honestly say about it. And nothing had ever come of it. This she told herself between bounces and jolts. And then she noticed that she was now really curious to find out how her unknown acquaintance would extricate himself from this business that was being entrusted to him as God’s deputy, so to speak—a vocation for which, surely, some degree of omniscience must have been granted him by the great Ina­ccessible One. For she in the meantime, squeezed between all kinds of people, had firmly resolved under no condition to deliver a full confession to him right away. But when she got out, she discovered within herself, remarkably enough, the deeply hidden conviction that this time it would be different from before and that she was determined to bring the Unfathomable out of the twilight and into the light, and to do so on her own if needs be. Perhaps she would have quickly extinguished this hyperbolic word if it had entered her consciousness at all; but what was there in place of a word was merely a surprised feeling that whirled her blood upward as if it were fire.