So one does not love in accordance with merit and reward, in the alternating chant of immortal spirits mortally in love?

That one is not loved as one deserves is the sorrow of all old maids of both sexes.

It was Agathe who gave this response. The eerily beautiful gratuitousness of love and the mild euphoria of injustice rose up from past love affairs and even reconciled her to the lack of dignity and seriousness she sometimes accused herself of on account of her game with Lindner, which she was always ashamed of when she was in Ulrich’s presence. But Ulrich had started the conversation, and in the course of it had become interested in sounding her out about her memories, for her way of viewing these delights was similar to his.

She looked at him, laughing. “Haven’t you ever adored someone and despised yourself for it?”

“I can honestly say I have not; but I won’t reject the thought with indignation,” Ulrich said. “It could have happened.”

“Haven’t you ever loved a person despite being eerily convinced,” Agathe continued excitedly, “that this person, whether he has a beard or breasts, a person you’re sure you know very well, and of whom you think highly, and who talks incessantly about you and himself, is actually just paying love a visit? You could leave out his way of thinking and his merits, you could change his fate, you could even furnish him with a different beard and different legs; you could almost leave him out, and you would still love him!—That is to say, insofar as you love him at all!” she added to temper her intensity.

Her voice had a deep sound, with an unsteady brightness in its depths, as if from a fire. Now she sat down guiltily, because in her unintentional eagerness she had sprung up from her chair.

Ulrich, too, felt slightly guilty because of this conversation, and smiled. He had not with any of his words intended to speak of love as one of the fashionably divided feelings that are termed “ambivalent” by the latest trend, which implies, more or less, that the soul, in the manner of tricksters, always winks with its left eye while pledging an oath with its right hand. Rather, he had taken pleasure in the fact that in order for love to arise and endure, no essential prerequisites are needed. That is, one loves someone despite everything, or, one could just as well say, for no reason; and that means either that the entire thing is a figment or else that the figment is itself an entire whole, just as the world is an entirety in which no sparrow falls from the roof without the All-Feeling-One being aware of it.

“So it doesn’t depend on anything at all!” Agathe exclaimed by way of conclusion. “Not on what a person is, not on what he means, not on what he wants, and not on what he does.”

It was clear to them that they were speaking of the soul’s certainty, or, as it might be better to avoid such a grand word, the uncertainty which they felt (using the term now with modest imprecision and in the aggregate sense) in their souls. And that they were talking about love, reminding each other of love’s mutability and its shape-shifting arts, happened only because it is one of the most intense and distinctive feelings, and yet such a suspect feeling before the stern bar of evaluative feeling that it causes judgment itself to falter. But of this the siblings had already received an inkling when they had barely begun to stroll in the sunshine of neighborly love; and remembering his assertion that even in this state of dazed beneficence one does not know whether one really loves people, and whether one loves people as they really are, or whether, and by means of what qualities, one is being duped by a fantasy and a mutation, Ulrich showed himself earnestly intent on holding the problematic relationship between feeling and knowing firmly in place with a knot, at least for now and in the spirit of the casual conversation that had just died away.