Agathe repeated her question with a small alteration: “I confided to you that I want a divorce from Professor Hagauer, and you replied that I am acting under external compulsion. It might be useful to me to learn what you mean by that. I repeat, none of the customary reasons quite applies; even my aversion has not been insurmountable by the standards of the world. I have just become convinced that aversion to ordinary life should not be surmounted, but must instead be increased beyond all measure!”

“By whom?”

“Just that is the question you’re supposed to help me solve.” Again she looked at him with a gentle smile that was, so to speak, a horribly low-cut décolleté exposing an inner bosom covered with nothing but black silk lace.

Involuntarily Lindner protected his eyes from the sight with a movement of his hand feigning an adjustment of his glasses. The truth was that courage played the same timid role in his worldview as it did in the feelings he harbored for Agathe. He was one of those people who have recognized that the victory of humility is facilitated if humility first knocks out arrogance with a fist, and his learned nature made him fear no arrogance more bitterly than that of independent science, which reproaches faith with being unscientific. Had someone told him that the saints with their empty, beseeching raised hands were obsolete and that to update them for the modern age they would have to be depicted with sabers, pistols, or even newer instruments in their fists, that might have aroused his indignation, but he did not want to see the weapons of knowledge withheld from faith. That was almost entirely an error, but he was not alone in committing it; and this was why he had assailed Agathe with words that would have merited a place of honor in his publications—and probably occupied that distinction in fact—but were out of place directed at the woman who was confiding in him. Seeing this emissary of worlds hostile to him sitting modestly and thoughtfully before him, delivered into his hands by a kind or demonic fate, he felt this himself and did not know how to answer her. “Oh!” he said, in as generalizing and dismissive a way as possible, and accidentally hit close to the mark: “I meant the prevailing spirit of our time that makes young people afraid of looking stupid or even unscientific if they don’t go along with all the modern superstitions. I have no idea what slogans there may be in your mind: Living it up! Life affirmation! Personal development! Freedom of thought, freedom in the arts! Everything, in short, except the commandments of simple and eternal morality.”

The happy intensification “stupid, or even unscientific” pleased him by its subtlety and had aroused his fighting spirit again. “You are no doubt surprised,” he continued, “that in conversing with you I attach such importance to science, without knowing whether you have given it a lot of your attention or just a little—”