“And you have a peculiar idea of gallantry!” Agathe coolly replied, for she had no wish to go on any longer.

Lindner found it necessary to say something more to recover his dignity: “You should learn in the school of reality to rein in your subjectivity with unsparing rigor, for a person who cannot do this will soon be dragged to the ground by fantasies and illusions. . . !” He paused, for the strange woman was still eliciting unwelcome emphases from his voice. “Woe to him who departs from morality, it is from reality he is departing!” he quietly added.

Agathe shrugged. “I will attend the school of reality! I hope to see you at our place the next time!” she suggested.

“To that I must respond: Never!” Lindner protested forcefully and now perfectly down-to-earth. “Your brother and I have divergent views on life that make it preferable for us not to engage socially,” he added as an excuse.

“In that case I will come to you,” Agathe calmly replied.

“No!” Lindner repeated, but curiously enough, he blocked her path in an almost menacing fashion, for she had got up to leave. “That must not happen! You must not put me in the ambiguous position toward my colleague Hagauer of receiving visits from you without his knowledge!”

“Are you always as impassioned as you are today?” Agathe asked sarcastically, thereby forcing him to make way for her. She now, at the end, felt vapid, yet also fortified. The fear Lindner had betrayed had moved her toward actions that were foreign to her true condition; but while her brother’s demands often discouraged her, this man gave her back her freedom to act at will from an inner impulse, and it comforted her to confuse him.

“Did I perhaps compromise myself a little?” Lindner asked himself after she had gone. He stiffened his shoulders and marched back and forth in the room several times. Finally he resolved to allow continued contact with her and summed up his considerable unease with the soldierly words: “One must be prepared to meet every discomfiture with valor!”

• • •

When Agathe got up to leave, Peter had quickly slipped away from the keyhole, where with considerable astonishment he had been eavesdropping on what his father was up to with the “big goose.”

*In Greek mythology, Niobe was excessively proud of her beauty and that of her fourteen children. The gods punished her by destroying her children, after which she turned into a stone monument of never-ending sorrow.

†The German word Wissenschaft, here unavoidably translated as “science,” refers also more generally to the pursuit of knowledge, learning, and scholarship.

29

BEGINNING OF A SERIES OF WONDROUS EXPERIENCES

Soon after this visit, there was a recurrence of the “Impossible,” which was already hovering almost physically around Ulrich and Agathe, and it truly happened without anything happening at all.