“Thank God!” Ulrich exclaimed. “It gives me pleasure every time I look at your youth, beauty, and strength and then hear you say that you have no energy! Our era is dripping with vigor and drive as it is. It’s had its fill of ideas, all it wants is action. This mania for action comes from having nothing to do. I mean inwardly. But even outwardly everyone spends his whole life just repeating one and the same act: getting ahead in the occupation he started out with. I think this brings us back to the question you asked me earlier, when we were outside. It’s so easy to summon the drive for action and so difficult to find a meaning in it! Hardly anyone understands this nowadays. That’s why men of action look like competitors in a bowling alley who know how to knock over ten wooden things with the gestures of a Napoleon. It wouldn’t even surprise me if they ended up flying at each other’s throats, overwhelmed by the incomprehensible fact that all their actions are insufficient!...” He had begun in a lively manner but then became pensive and even fell silent for a while. At last he just looked up with a smile and contented himself with saying: “You say that if I expect you to make a moral effort, you will disappoint me. I say that if you expect me to give you moral advice, I will disappoint you. It seems to me that we ought not to have any specific requirements of each other; I mean all of us: Truly, instead of demanding deeds of one another, we ought to lay the foundations for them; that is my feeling!”

“But how should one do that?!” Agathe said. She was aware that Ulrich had deviated from the big general discourse he had begun and had arrived at more personal considerations, but even these were too general for her taste. She had, as we know, a prejudice against general analyses and regarded any mental effort that extended beyond her own skin, so to speak, as rather pointless; she was certain of this with regard to exertions that might be required of herself, and assumed it was probably true of the generalizing statements of others as well. Still, she understood Ulrich quite well. She noticed that her brother, as he sat there with his head lowered, softly arguing against the spirit of action, was unconsciously carving lines and notches into the tabletop with the blade of his pocketknife, and that all the sinews of his hand were taut. The thoughtless but almost passionate activity of this hand, and that he had said so frankly that she was young and beautiful, was a purposeless duet above the orchestra of the other words; nor did she give it any significance other than that she was sitting here and watching.