Agathe again shook her head, but there was warmth in her eyes. “It’s a high-hearted, passionate, happy, magnanimous assignment!” she cried out reproachfully. “Examples of it are ‘Love your enemies!’ ‘Repay their misdeeds with kindness!’ ‘Love without thought of reward!’” Suddenly she paused and looked at her brother dumbfounded. “But what is it that one loves in a person if one doesn’t know him at all?” she asked innocently.

Ulrich gave himself time before answering. “Haven’t you noticed today that it’s actually disturbing when you encounter a person whom you personally like and find so beautiful you would like to say something fitting about him?”

Agathe nodded. “So our feeling,” she conceded, “isn’t about the real world and the real person.”

“Which leaves us with the question: What is it that our feeling is responding to—what part of the world, or what transformation and transfiguration of the real person and the real world?” Ulrich quietly completed her thought.

Now it was Agathe who at first gave no answer; but her gaze was excited and lit up by imagination. Finally, she responded shyly with a counterproposal: “Maybe from behind the ordinary truth the great truth will appear?”

Ulrich hesitantly resisted this, shaking his head; but shimmering through Agathe’s inquiring assertion was something undeniably evident. The air and the pleasure of those days were so buoyant and tender that one could not resist the impression that man and the world must perforce show themselves to be more real than real. There was a small suprasensory thrill of adventure in this transparency, comparable to the flowing transparency of a brook that allows one to see to the bottom, yet, even as one’s wavering glance arrives there, makes the gaily colored mysterious stones resemble the skin of a fish, whose smoothness now all the more thoroughly hides what the eye thought to discern. By merely relaxing her gaze a little, Agathe, surrounded by sunshine, was able to feel that she had entered a supernatural realm; it was then quite easy for her to believe, for a very brief span, that she had come in contact with a higher truth and reality, or at least glimpsed an aspect of existence where a little door behind the earth secretly leads from the earthly garden to that which is not of this world. But when she returned her gaze to its usual range and let the full glare of life stream in, she would see whatever happened to be there: perhaps a little flag gaily and not at all mysteriously swung by the hand of a child; a police van with prisoners, its black-green paint flashing in the light; a man with a colorful cap sweeping away manure among carts and carriages; a division of recruits whose shouldered rifles were pointing their barrels at the sky. And all this was bathed in something that had a kinship with love; and all the people, too, seemed more ready to open themselves to this feeling than usual: But to believe that the kingdom of love was now really here, Ulrich finally said, was surely as difficult as it would be to imagine that at this moment dogs could not bite and no one could do anything evil!