Ulrich—always the Ulrich in the state of older brother and somewhat obtuse dispenser of edifying counsel—jolted upright and cried out: “Would it really be overwrought to suffer revulsion and immediately draw all the necessary conclusions?!” He tried to soften his words by following them with a smile and looking at his sister in as friendly a way as possible.

Agathe was also looking at him; her face was wide open from the effort of trying to read his features. “Surely a healthy person won’t be so piqued by an awkward situation?!” she persisted. “What does it matter, after all?”

This had the effect of causing Ulrich to pull himself together, with the resolve to no longer entrust his thoughts to a partial self. He was now once more the man of functional understanding. “You are right,” he said, “what do processes as such really matter! What matters is the system of ideas through which we regard them, and the personal system these form a part of.”

“How do you mean that?” Agathe asked distrustfully.

Ulrich apologized for putting it so abstractly, but while he searched for a more accessible analogy, his brotherly jealousy returned and influenced his choice of terms: “Suppose a woman we care about has been raped,” he said. “Within the framework of a heroic system of ideas we would have to expect revenge or suicide; in a cynical-pragmatic framework, we would expect her to shake it off like a hen; and what would actually happen today would probably be a combination of the two; but this inner incertitude is more loathsome than anything.”

But Agathe did not accept this way of putting it either. “Does it really seem so awful to you?”

“I don’t know. It seemed to me that it must be humiliating to live with a person one does not love. But now—as you will!”

“Is it worse than when a woman who wants to marry less than three months after her divorce is compelled by the State to be examined by an officially appointed gynecologist to see whether she’s pregnant or not, because of the laws of inheritance? I’ve read that that happens!” Agathe’s forehead seemed to bulge with protective anger, and the little vertical furrow between her eyebrows had appeared again. “And every one of them gets over it if she has to!” she said contemptuously.

“I don’t disagree with you,” Ulrich replied. “All events, once they actually happen, pass like rain and sunshine. You’re probably much more sensible than I am in considering these things in a natural way; but a man’s nature is not natural, it impinges on nature and alters it and is therefore sometimes overwrought.” His smile was a plea for friendship, and his eyes saw how young she was. The skin on her face scarcely creased when she was agitated, but was further tautened and smoothed by the inner tension, like a glove on a clenched fist.

“I never thought about this in such general terms,” she now said. “But after listening to you, it seems to me again that the life I’ve been leading has put me terribly in the wrong.”