This may not have been exactly a sober plan of action. But it seemed to her that, with a firm intention, it must be attainable; and she pulled herself together as if she were trying to feign death. But it soon proved as impossible to completely silence all thoughts and all reports from the senses and the will as it had been in childhood not to commit any sins between confession and communion; and after some effort she completely gave up the attempt. In the process, she discovered that she was only superficially adhering to her purpose, and that her attention had long since slipped away. At the moment, it was occupied with a quite far-flung question, a little monster of dereliction: she was asking herself in the most foolish way, and was very intent on the foolishness of it: “Have I really ever been violent, mean, hateful, and unhappy?” A man without a name came to mind; who lacked a name because she bore it and had carried it away with her. When she thought of him, her name felt like a scar; but she no longer felt hatred for Hagauer, and now she repeated her question with the slightly melancholy stubbornness with which one gazes after a wave that has flowed on. What had happened to the desire to do him almost mortal harm? She had nearly lost it in her distraction and appeared to believe it must be possible to find it somewhere nearby. Moreover, Lindner might well be a stand-in for this desire for hostility; she asked herself this too and thought of him fleetingly. Perhaps now it seemed astonishing to her how much had already happened to her, young people being as a rule more prone to be surprised at how much they have already had to feel than older people, who have become as used to the inconstancy of passions and circumstances as they are to changes in the weather. But nothing could have meant more to Agathe than this: At that very moment, mysteriously detached from the great reversal in her life, from the flight of its passions and conditions, from the wondrous stream of emotion (in which youth ordinarily believes itself returned to the glory of primordial nature), there stood out again the stone-clear sky of motionless reverie from which she had just awakened.

So her thoughts, while still under the spell of the festive procession of flowers and of death, were no longer moving with it in its mute, solemn way; rather, Agathe was “thinking to and fro,” as one could describe it in contrast to the state of mind in which life lasts “a thousand years” without a wingbeat. This difference between two states of mind was very clear; and she recognized with some amazement how often just this difference, or something closely related to it, had already been touched on in her conversations with Ulrich. Involuntarily she turned to her brother, and without losing sight of the spectacle surrounding them she took a deep breath and asked: “Doesn’t it seem to you too that at a moment like this, and in comparison with it, everything else seems irrelevant?”