With this, their conversation was finished for the time being. Agathe apologized for not having considered that Ulrich must be hungry and tired, and led him into a room where tea had been served; finding that something was missing from the tray, she went to fetch it herself. Ulrich used the opportunity to recall her husband as clearly as he could, in order to understand her better. He was a man of medium height with a rigidly straight back, pudgy legs in crudely tailored trousers, rather thick lips under a bristly moustache, and a fondness for large-patterned ties, evidently to show that he was no ordinary schoolmaster but a modern pedagogue willing to move with the times. Ulrich felt his old misgivings against Agathe’s choice revive; but remembering the open candor that shone from Gottlieb Hagauer’s eyes and forehead, it was inconceivable that this man would harbor some secret vice. “He’s simply a model of enlightened, hardworking goodwill, a man doing his laudable best to advance the human race in his field without meddling in matters outside his domain,” Ulrich decided, and then, remembering Hagauer’s writing, he descended into thoughts that were not entirely pleasant.

Such people can already be spotted in their school years. They are not conscientious (as is usually said of them, confusing the effect with the cause) so much as methodical and practical in their studies. They lay out every task beforehand the way one must lay out the clothes one will wear the next morning, piece by piece, down to the collar studs and cuff links, if one wants to dress quickly and without fumbling. There is no train of thought they cannot firmly affix to their minds with those five or six buttons they have at the ready, and there is no denying that the results speak for themselves and stand up to scrutiny. In this way they advance to the head of the class without being felt to be morally unpleasant by their classmates, while people like Ulrich, whose nature tempts them to now slightly exceed and then just as slightly fall short of what is required, are left behind in a way that treads as slowly and softly as fate itself, even if they are far more gifted. He noticed that secretly he was in awe of these shining examples, for their intellectual precision made his own romantic enthusiasm for exactness look a little dubious. “They don’t have a trace of soul,” he thought, “and are thoroughly good-natured. After their sixteenth year, when young people get inflamed over spiritual questions, they seem to fall behind a little and are not really able to understand new ideas and feelings, but here too they work with their ten buttons, and there comes a day when they can demonstrate that they understood everything all along, ‘of course without going to untenable extremes,’ and in the end it is they who in effect usher these ideas into public life, which for others have become vestiges of their faded youth or the kind of hyperbole one indulges in solitude.” And so, by the time Agathe came back into the room, Ulrich, though he still could not imagine what might have happened to her, felt that a battle with her husband, even without just cause, was something that would possess an utterly contemptible inclination to give him pleasure.