And suddenly, unprompted by anything they had said, Agathe cried out: “Now just imagine all of this extended to everything, and you have Gottlieb Hagauer!” And she began to imitate her husband like a schoolgirl: “Do you really not know that Lamium album is the white dead nettle?” “And how else could we make any progress, if not by walking the same arduous path of induction, at the hand of a faithful guide, that brought the human race through many thousands of years of strenuous labor, with many mistakes, to its present state of knowledge?” “Can’t you see, my dear Agathe, that thinking is also a moral obligation? What is concentration if not a constant conquest of indolence?” “And intellectual discipline is that training of the mind by which man becomes steadily more capable of working out long series of concepts rationally and with constant skepticism toward his own notions, which is to say, by means of flawless syllogisms, by chain inferences and inference chains, by induction or by demonstrations per signum, and by submitting the conclusions thus gained to verification until all the concepts have been brought into conformity.” —Ulrich marveled at his sister’s feat of memory. Agathe seemed to take enormous pleasure in reciting these pedantries, which she had appropriated God knows where, perhaps from a book, in perfect word order. She claimed that was how Hagauer talked.

Ulrich did not believe her. “How could you have memorized such long, complicated sentences just from hearing them?”

“They stuck in my mind,” Agathe replied. “That’s how I am.”

“Do you even know,” Ulrich asked, astonished, “what verification and demonstrations per signum are?”

“No idea!” Agathe admitted with a laugh. “Maybe he only read it somewhere too. But he talks that way. And I learned it by heart as a series of meaningless words by listening to him. I think I did it out of anger at him, for talking like that. You’re different from me; with me, things just stay inside me because I don’t know what to do with them—that’s my good memory. It’s due to being stupid that I have a frightfully good memory!” She acted as if this state of affairs were a sad truth that she would have to shake off in order to continue in her exuberant manner: “With Hagauer, this even goes on when he plays tennis: ‘When, in learning to play tennis, I deliberately for the first time place my racket in a certain position in order to give the ball, which up to that point was sailing across the net to my satisfaction, a particular direction, I am intervening in the course of the phenomenal world: I am experimenting!’”

“Is he a good tennis player?”

“I always beat him six–love.”

They laughed.

“Do you realize,” Ulrich said, “that Hagauer is factually quite right about everything you have him say? It just sounds comical.”

“It may well be that he’s right,” Agathe replied. “I don’t understand any of it. But you know, there was a boy in his school who translated a passage from Shakespeare, ‘Cowards die many times before their deaths,’ literally, word for word, and Hagauer crossed it all out and replaced it with the old Schlegel-Tieck version, line by line, word for word! And there’s another passage I remember, I think it’s by Pindar, which went: ‘The law of nature, King of all mortals and immortals, reigns supreme, approving the most violent things, with almighty hand!’ and he decided to give it a final polish: “The law of nature, reigning over mortals and immortals, rules with almighty hand, approving even violence.’ And wasn’t it beautiful, the way that little boy he corrected translated the words exactly the way he found them, like a heap of stones spilled out from a mosaic, with such spine-chilling directness?” Raising an arm and wrapping her hand around the doorpost as if around the trunk of a tree, she recited the rough-hewn verses again, hurling out the words with wild and beautiful fervor, her eyes reflecting the pride of youth, undeterred by the hapless shrunken body that lay beneath her gaze.