Though perhaps it was rather that he was one of those people who always do good; the goodness is not in themselves, Agathe thought. Apparently goodness disappears from people to the degree that it turns into goodwill or good deeds! How had Ulrich put it? A stream that turns factory wheels loses its gradient. Yes, he had said that too, but it wasn’t what she was looking for. Now she had it: “It seems that it’s really only those people who don’t do much good who are able to preserve all their goodness”! But the moment she had the sentence, plausibly the way Ulrich must have said it, it struck her as completely nonsensical. It couldn’t be taken out of the forgotten context of their conversation. She tried shifting the position of the words and exchanging them for similar ones; but then it became clear that the first version was the right one, for the others were as if spoken into the wind and there was nothing left of them. So Ulrich had said it that way, but: “How can one call people good who behave badly?” she thought. “This really is nonsense!” And she knew: that statement, at the moment when Ulrich pronounced it, though it signified no more then than it did now, had been wonderful! “Wonderful” was not the word for it: she had almost felt sick with joy when she heard that sentence! Such statements explained her whole life. This one, for instance, had been uttered during their last long talk, after the funeral and after Professor Hagauer had left; and suddenly she had realized how carelessly she had always acted, including the time when she had simply thought it would “work out somehow” with Hagauer because he was “a good person”! Ulrich often said things that for a moment would fill her entirely with joy or misery, even though it wasn’t possible to “keep” those moments. When was it, for example, that he had said that in some circumstances he might love a thief but never a person who was honest from habit? She couldn’t remember at the moment, but the marvelous thing was that she very soon realized it was not he who had said it but herself. As a matter of fact, much of what he said she had already thought: just not with words, for with only herself to rely on, as she had been until now, she would never have made such definite assertions! Agathe, who up to now had been feeling very content among the jolts and bumps of the car as it drove along cobbled suburban streets, wrapping them both in a net of mechanical vibrations that rendered them speechless, had also used her husband’s name in the midst of her thoughts with the same placid contentment and merely as a term of reference to a certain time and its contents; but now, slowly and for no particular reason, an infinite horror went through her: Hagauer had actually been there with her in the flesh! The fair-minded way in which she had been thinking of him disappeared, and her throat tightened with bitterness.