“You just talked strangely again,” Agathe noted dispassionately, intending to shut off his insolence with a few dry words; but then she imagined the enormous fall he would face and preferred to humble herself gently by checking her impulse, and continued with a voice that seemed suddenly to have been darkened by remorse: “I only came because I wanted you to guide me.”

Lindner, helpless in his zeal, continued swinging his rhetorical whip; he sensed that Agathe was deliberately leading him astray, but he could not find his way back and entrusted himself to the future. “To be chained to a man for a lifetime without feeling any physical attraction is certainly a harsh punishment,” he exclaimed. “But hasn’t one brought this on oneself, especially if one’s partner is unworthy, by not paying enough attention to the signs of the inner life?! Many women allow themselves to be beguiled by external circumstances, and who knows if one is not being punished in order to be shaken up?” Suddenly his voice cracked. Agathe had been accompanying his words with assenting nods; but the notion of Hagauer as a beguiling seducer was too much for her, and the amusement in her eyes betrayed it. Extremely bewildered, Lindner blared in falsetto: “For he who spares the rod hates his child, but he who loves him chastises him!!”

By now his victim’s resistance had completely transformed the philosopher of life dwelling in his high watchtower into a poet of chastisement and its arousing secondary effects. He was intoxicated by a feeling he had not experienced before, born of an intimate connection between the moral censure with which he was goading his visitor and the excitation of all his manhood, an emotion that one might symbolically characterize, as he himself now accepted, as lustful.

But the “arrogant conqueress,” who was supposed to be ultimately driven to despair by the empty vanity of her worldly beauty, responded matter-of-factly to his threats of the rod by quietly asking: “By whom am I being punished? Are you thinking of God?”

And that could not be said aloud! Lindner suddenly lost his courage. Beads of sweat stood among the hairs on his head. It was impossible to utter the name of God in such a context. His gaze, thrust out like a two-pronged fork, slowly withdrew from Agathe. Agathe felt it. “So he can’t do it either!” she thought. She felt a mad desire to keep on tugging at this man until she heard from his mouth what he did not want to disclose to her. But it was enough for now; the conversation had reached its outermost limit. Agathe understood that it had only been a passionate subterfuge, transparent in its very fervor, to avoid having to say the essential thing. Besides, Lindner, too, now knew that everything he had propounded, indeed everything that had excited and upset him, even his own exaggerations, only came from his fear of all exaggeration, of which the most profligate kind, in his view, was the attempt to encroach, with the meddling instruments of sensation and feeling, upon that which must remain shrouded in sublime language, and that this hyperbolic young woman was obviously driving him in that direction. He now called it, silently in his own mind, “a violation of the decency of faith.” For during these moments, the blood flowed back down from Lindner’s head and resumed its ordinary course; he awoke like a person who finds himself standing naked far from his front door, and remembered that he must not send Agathe away without consolation and instruction. Taking a deep breath, he stood back from her, stroked his beard, and said reproachfully: “You have an unquiet and illusion-prone mind.”