In a gesture that could be taken as patronizing or playful, he put his hands on her shoulders, purely out of awkwardness. But Agathe stepped back with a serious face and did not play along. “Did you make that up?” she asked.

“No, a man I love said that.”

She had something of the sullenness of a child who is being forced to think hard as she succinctly summed up Ulrich’s answers: “So you wouldn’t call a person good who is honest out of habit? But a thief who steals for the first time, with his heart almost leaping out of his chest, you would call good?”

These odd words took Ulrich aback, and he became more serious. “I really don’t know,” he said curtly. “There are situations where I myself don’t much care whether something is considered right or wrong, but I can’t give you a rule to go by.”

Agathe slowly detached her searching gaze from him and returned to the will again: “We have to read further, here’s another marked passage,” she admonished herself.

Before taking to his bed for the last time, their father had written a series of letters, and his will contained notes elucidating their content and instructions as to where they were to be sent. The specially marked passage referred to the letter for Professor Schwung, and Professor Schwung was that former colleague who after a lifelong friendship had galled and embittered the last year of the old man’s life by opposing his view on the statute regarding diminished responsibility. Ulrich immediately recognized the familiar long-drawn-out arguments about imagination and will, the sharpness of law and the ambiguity of nature, which his father had summarized for him once again shortly before his death. Nothing seemed to have been as much on his mind in his final days as Schwung’s denunciation of the “social school” of jurisprudence which he had joined, as an emanation of the Prussian spirit. He had just begun to outline a pamphlet that was to bear the title “The State and the Law, or Consistency and Denunciation,” when he felt his strength beginning to fail and saw, with bitterness, his enemy in sole possession of the field. In solemn words such as are only inspired by the imminence of death and the struggle to preserve the hallowed good of one’s reputation, he obliged his children not to let his work fall into oblivion, and imposed on his son in particular the duty to cultivate the influential connections he had gained thanks to his father’s tireless exhortations, in order to thoroughly crush Professor Schwung’s hopes of realizing his aims.