The weather had turned summery again, and they spent a lot of time outdoors. Flowers and shrubs were blooming in the garden. When Ulrich looked at a flower—which was not exactly an old habit of this once impatient man—he now sometimes found no end to beholding what he saw and, for that matter, no beginning either. If by chance he knew the flower’s name, it was salvation from the sea of infinity. Then the little golden stars on a bare, supple wand signified “forsythia,” and those premature leaves and umbels were “lilacs.” But if he did not know the name, he would call the gardener over, for then this old man would pronounce an unknown name, and everything would be all right again, and the ancient magic by which possession of the right word vouchsafes protection from the untamed wildness of things bestowed its calming power as it had ten thousand years ago. But something else could happen too: Ulrich would find himself deserted and without support facing some little branch or blossom and not even Agathe was nearby, with whom he could have shared his ignorance: then it suddenly seemed to him utterly impossible to understand the bright green of a young leaf, and the mysteriously limited profusion of forms in a little flower cup became an uninterrupted circle of infinite variation. In addition, it was hardly possible for a man like him, if he did not lie to himself, which on Agathe’s account alone could not be allowed to happen, to believe in one of those bashful rendezvous with nature, whose murmurings and upturned eyes, sweet pieties and silent music-making are the prerogative of a special simplicity which imagines that no sooner has it laid its head in the grass, God is already tickling its neck, notwithstanding the fact that on weekdays it has no objection to nature being bought and sold at the fruit exchange. Ulrich despised this cut-rate mysticism at the cheapest price and praise, whose constant talk of being ravished by Grace is at bottom exceedingly lewd;^* better to abandon himself to the impotence of trying to find words for an almost palpable color, or of describing one of those shapes that spoke for themselves in such a mindlessly haunting way. For in such a con­dition the word does not cut, and the fruit remains on the branch although one thinks it already in one’s mouth: that is probably the first secret of daylight mysticism. And Ulrich tried to tell his sister about it, albeit with the ulterior motive that it should not, some day, disappear like an illusion.