This made a bad impression on Ulrich at first. Often married women, when they think of a man as a possible lover, will tell him this kind of story; and although his sister had made her disclosure with embarrassment, and yet willfully, in an awkward and transparent effort to initiate something or other, it bothered him that she hadn’t thought of a more original line; he considered the whole thing an exaggeration. “Frankly,” he said, “I never understood how you could live with a man like that.”

Agathe replied that their father had wanted it, and what could she have done about it?

“But you were a widow then, not a child!”

“That’s exactly why. I had returned to Papa; everybody was saying I was too young to live alone, because even though I was a widow, I was just nineteen years old; and then I just couldn’t stand it here.”

“But why didn’t you find yourself another man? Or study something and start an independent life that way?” Ulrich asked, unrelenting.

Agathe just shook her head. She paused briefly before answering: “I already told you, I’m lazy.”

Ulrich felt this was no answer. “So you had a special reason for marrying Hagauer!?”

“Yes.”

“You were in love with someone you couldn’t have?”

Agathe hesitated. “I loved my deceased husband.”

Ulrich regretted that he had used the word “love” so tritely, as though he regarded the importance of the institution it refers to as inviolable. “One wants to give comfort,” he thought, “and just that is already like doling out charity.” Nevertheless he felt tempted to continue talking in the same vein. “And then you realized what had befallen you and you started to make trouble for Hagauer,” he said.

“Yes,” Agathe said. “But not right away—quite late,” she added. “Very late, in fact.”

At this point they got into a little argument.

These confessions were visibly costing Agathe an effort, though she offered them of her own volition and evidently, as was natural at her age, considered the negotiation of sexual life to be an important topic for everyone. She seemed prepared from the start to take the chance of not being understood, sought his trust, and was firmly and not without candor and passion intent on securing her brother’s allegiance. But Ulrich, though morally still in a mood of largesse, was not able as yet to meet her halfway. For all his strength of spirit, he was not always free from the prejudices his mind rejected, having too often allowed his life to go one way and his mind another. And because he had too often exploited and abused his influence over women with a hunter’s delight in trapping and observing his quarry, he had almost always encountered the corresponding image of woman as game that collapses under the man’s love-spear, and his memory was deeply imprinted with the raptures of humiliation to which a woman in love subjects herself, while the man is far from experiencing any comparable surrender. This conception of masculine power and feminine weakness is still quite common today, even though new ideas have evolved with the successive waves of youth, and the naturalness with which Agathe talked about her dependence on Hagauer pained her brother. It seemed to Ulrich that his sister had suffered a degradation without being fully aware of it, by submitting herself to the influence of a man he disliked and persisting in that condition for years. He did not say this, but Agathe must have read something like it in his face, for she suddenly said: “I couldn’t very well run away from him right away, once I had married him; that would have been a little overwrought!”