The philosophy Agathe acquired in this way was simply that of the female human being who refuses to be taken in and cannot help noticing what the male human being is trying to put over on her. In fact, it was not a philosophy at all, but only a defiantly hidden disappointment, still mingled with a cautious readiness for some unknown resolution, a readiness that perhaps increased in the same measure as the outward defiance abated. Since Agathe was well read, but by her nature not inclined to engage in theories, she often had occasion, when she compared her own experiences with the ideals of books and the theater, to wonder why her seducers had never held her spellbound like game caught in a trap, which would have accorded with the Don Juan–like self-image a man of that time would have adopted if, with a woman’s consent, he stumbled into an affair; nor had life with her husband assumed the form of a Strindbergian battle of the sexes in which the captive woman, by the rules of this secondary mode, uses her powers of cunning and weakness to torment her despotic and inept lord and master to death. In point of fact her relations with Hagauer, in contrast to her deeper feelings about him, had always remained quite good. On the first evening Ulrich had used big words like “terror,” “shock,” and “rape” that were completely off the mark. “I very much regret not being able to serve up an angel in my stead,” Agathe thought, bristling again at the memory, for in fact everything in her marriage had taken a very natural course. Her father had supported the man’s proposal with sensible reasons, she herself had decided to marry again: fine, one does it, one has to put up with whatever is involved; it’s neither particularly beautiful nor excessively unpleasant. Even now she was still sorry to be consciously hurting Hagauer, though she absolutely wanted to do just that! She had not entered the marriage with a hope for love; she had thought it would all work out somehow. He was a good man, after all.