When Agathe thought about it later, she was by no means completely satisfied. What she disapproved of in her behavior was that its form reminded her of a strange illness that had befallen her as a child soon after she had started school. For more than a year she had suffered from a not inconsiderable fever that neither rose nor subsided, and had become so frail and emaciated that the doctors were worried, as they could not find a cause. Nor was this illness ever explained later. Now, Agathe had doubtless enjoyed seeing how the great doctors from the university, who looked so dignified and full of wisdom when they first entered her room, lost some of their confidence from week to week; and even though she obediently swallowed every medicine that was prescribed for her and really would have liked to get well, because it was expected of her, she was still pleased that the doctors with all their knowledge could not bring about a cure, and felt herself to be in a supernatural or at least extraordinary state as less and less of her remained. She was proud that the grown-ups had no power over her as long as she was sick, and had no idea how her little body was able to do it. But in the end it recovered of its own accord and in a way that seemed just as remarkable.

Almost all she knew about it today was what the servants had told her later. They claimed that a beggar woman who often came into the house but was once rudely turned away had bewitched her; and Agathe had never found out how much truth there was in this story, for the servants liked to indulge in hints but avoided explanations and appeared to be afraid of violating a strict ban Agathe’s father was said to have imposed. Her own memory had retained only a single, but vivid, image from that time, in which she saw her father striking out in a flaming rage at an untrustworthy-looking woman and slapping her face several times; it was the only time in her life she had seen that small, almost always painfully fair-minded intellectual so utterly changed and beside himself; but as far as she could recall, that had happened not before but during her illness, for she was fairly certain that she was lying in bed at the time, and that this bed, instead of being in her room in the attic, had been on the floor below, “with the grown-ups,” in one of the rooms where the servants should not have allowed the beggar woman to enter, even though she was not a stranger to the kitchen and below stairs. Indeed, it seemed to Agathe that this incident must have occurred toward the end of her illness and that she had suddenly recovered a few days later, roused from her bed by that peculiar impatience with which this illness ended as unexpectedly as it had begun.