At that moment the housekeeper entered the room and announced Agathe. August Lindner sat up in consternation. “So she did come!” a horribly distinct mute voice said to him. He was prepared to feel indignant, but he was also prepared to feel a fraternal indulgence guided by the natural empath’s delicate moral sense of touch, and these two antagonists, each with a great retinue of principles, performed a wild chase through his entire body before he managed to give the simple order to show the lady into the living room. “You wait for me here!” he said to Peter severely and left the room with long strides. But Peter had noticed something unusual in his father, he just didn’t know what; in any case, whatever it was inspired him with such recklessness and courage that after Lindner’s departure and a brief hesitation he scooped into his mouth a spoonful of chocolate that was standing ready to be sprinkled, then a spoonful of sugar, and finally a big spoonful of rice, chocolate, and sugar, and repeated this several times before smoothing out the bowls for all eventualities.

And Agathe sat awhile alone in the strange house waiting for Professor Lindner, for he was pacing back and forth in another room, collecting his thoughts before confronting the beautiful and dangerous woman.

She looked around and suddenly felt anxious, as if she had lost her way climbing among the branches of a dreamed tree and had to fear not being able to find her way back safely from its world of twisted wood and myriad leaves. A profusion of details bewildered her, and in the austere taste that had found expression in them a forbidding severity was very peculiarly entwined with an opposite for which, in her unsettled state, she could not find a ready word. The forbidding quality may have been reminiscent of the frozen stiffness of chalk drawings, but the room also looked as if it smelled, in a grandmotherly, cosseted way, of medicaments and ointments; and there was a hovering presence within it of old-fashioned, unmanly spirits preoccupied with human suffering in a disagreeably ostentatious way. Agathe sniffed. And though the air contained nothing more than her imaginings, she gradually found herself being led further and further back, and now remembered the slightly anxious “smell of heaven,” that odor of incense, stale and emptied of its spice, that clung to the habits her teachers wore when she was a girl being brought up together with little friends in a pious institute, and where she was far from languishing in piety. For edifying though this odor is for people who form the right association with it, in the hearts of worldly and resistant adolescent girls its effect consisted in a vivid memory of feelings of protest, not unlike those that imagination and first experiences associate with a man’s moustache or with his energetic cheeks, redolent of pungent essences and a hint of talc. God knows, that scent, too, does not keep its promises! And while Agathe sat waiting on one of Lindner’s renunciatory upholstered chairs, the empty smell of the world and the empty smell of heaven joined together and enclosed her inescapably like two hollow hemispheres, and a premonition came over her that she was about to repeat a lesson she had lived through without paying sufficient attention.