Can the memories of two people talking of a past familiar to both not only supplement each other but also meld even before they are uttered? Something of the kind was happening at that moment! A shared state of mind surprised, even bewildered, the siblings, like hands coming out of coats in places one would never expect and suddenly grasping each other. Each of them suddenly knew more of the past than either of them thought they knew, and Ulrich was feeling again the fever light creeping up the walls from the floor, similarly to the glistening of the candles in the room they were standing in now. Then his father had come, waded through the cone of light cast by the table lamp, and sat down by his bed. “If your moral sense was notably troubled by the possible consequences of what you intended to do, a milder view might be taken of the deed, but in that case you will first have to admit it to yourself!” Perhaps those were words from the will or from the letters about ¶318 that had insinuated themselves into Ulrich’s memory. Normally he had no memory for detail, nor for the wording of phrases; so it was something quite unusual that suddenly in his recollection entire groups of sentences stood before him, and it had to do with his sister standing before him, as if it were her proximity that was bringing about this change in him. “If you had the strength to decide upon a wicked deed of your own free will, independent of any compelling need, then you must also realize that you acted wrongly!” Ulrich continued aloud. “He must have talked that way to you too.”

“Maybe not quite the same way,” Agathe replied. “He usually told me my faults were ‘mitigated by my inner constitution.’ He was always reproaching me for not understanding that will is connected to thought and is not about acting on instinct.”

“It is the will,” Ulrich quoted, “that, with the gradual development of the faculties of understanding and reason, must subjugate desire, which is to say instinct, by means of reflection and the resolution that follows upon it.”

“Is that true?” his sister asked.

“Why do you ask?”

“Probably because I’m stupid.”

“You’re not stupid.”

“I was always a slow learner and never really understood what I learned.”

“That doesn’t prove much.”

“Then I’m probably spoiled, because I don’t assimilate what I do understand.”

They were standing face-to-face, close to each other, leaning against the posts of the door to the side room, which had been left open when Professor Schwung departed; daylight and candlelight played on their faces, and their voices intertwined as in a responsory, Ulrich intoning his phrases like liturgy and Agathe’s lips serenely following. The old ordeal of those admonitions, which consisted in forcing a harsh and alien system into the tender, uncomprehending brain of a child, amused them now, and they were playing with it.