Agathe detested female emancipation just as much as she despised the female need to raise a brood for which a male must supply the nest. She liked to think back on the time when she had first felt her breasts stretching the fabric of her dress and had borne her burning lips through the cooling air of the streets. But the evolved erotic fuss and bustle that emerges from the protective veils of girlhood like a round knee from pink tulle had aroused her scorn throughout her life. When she asked herself what she was actually convinced of, the answer she received was a feeling that she was destined to experience something extraordinary and different; and this had been the case already back then, when she knew almost nothing about the world and did not believe the little that she had been taught. And it had always seemed to her a mysterious kind of activity, corresponding to this impression, to let everything happen to her as it would, if necessary, without immediately overestimating its importance.

Agathe looked at Ulrich, who was sitting gravely and stiffly at her side, swaying with the movements of the car; she remembered how hard put he had been to comprehend, on their first evening together, that she had not run away from her husband on her wedding night even though she did not like him. She had felt tremendous respect for her big brother while awaiting his arrival, but now she smiled, secretly recalling the impression Hagauer’s thick lips had made on her in those first months whenever they rounded amorously beneath the bristles of his moustache: his entire face would be drawn in thick-skinned folds toward the corners of his mouth, and she would feel, as if filled to satiety: “Oh, what an ugly man this is!” She had also endured his mild pedagogic vanity and goodness as merely physical nausea, more outer than inner. After the first surprise was over, she had occasionally been unfaithful to him: “If one wants to call it that,” she thought, “when, to an inexperienced young thing whose sensuality is dormant, the advances of a man who is not her husband come like a thunderous knocking at the door!” She had shown little talent for infidelity: Lovers, once she had come to know them, struck her as no more compelling than husbands, and it seemed to her that she could just as well take seriously the ceremonial masks of an African tribe as the romantic masquerades of European men. Not that she had never lost her head: but with the first attempts at repeating the magic, the spell was gone. The enacted fantasy world and theatricality of love left her untransported. These stage directions for the soul, elaborated by men for the most part, all amounting to the notion that life, being hard, should now and then contain an hour of weakness—with one or another variation on the theme of weakening: the enthrallment, the languishing, the being taken, the giving of oneself, the succumbing, the losing of one’s senses, and so forth—struck her as cheaply melodramatic and overdone, since she had at no time ever felt herself to be other than weak in a world so superbly constructed by the strength of men.