This, among all the other things they had already said about morality, was one of the poignant doubts her brother had implanted in her mind, and it played a part in an inner reawakening she had been feeling since, without having a clear idea of what it was. For the state of indifference she pointedly displayed and encouraged within herself had not always ruled her life. Something had happened once that caused this need for self-punishment to emerge directly from a deep despondency that had made her regard herself as a worthless person because she believed she had not been granted the capacity to keep faith with lofty emotions, and since then she had despised herself for the apathy of her heart. This episode lay between her life as a girl in her father’s house and her incomprehensible marriage to Hagauer and occupied such a narrow span of her life that even Ulrich, for all his sympathy, had not thought of asking her about it. What happened does not take long to tell: At the age of eighteen Agathe had married a man who was only slightly older than herself, and on a trip that began with their wedding and ended with his death, he was torn away from her within a few weeks by a sickness he contracted while traveling before they had even decided upon their future home. The doctors called it typhus, and Agathe repeated the word after them and found a semblance of order in it, for this was the side of the event that was polished smooth for the use of the world; but on the unpolished side it was different: until then Agathe had lived with her father, who was universally respected, so that she came to doubt herself and, worse, presume herself unjust in not loving him, and the long, uncertain waiting for herself at school, with its attendant self-mistrust, had not stabilized her relationship to the world either; later, on the other hand, when her spirits were suddenly stirred into life, and in a joint effort with the companion of her youth she managed in a few months to surmount all obstacles to a marriage arising from their age, even though the lovers’ families had no objection to each other, she had all at once ceased to be lonely and just for that reason become herself. This, then, could well be called love; but there are lovers who gaze into love as into the sun and are merely blinded, and there are lovers who behold life with amazement for the first time when it is illuminated by love. It was to the second kind that Agathe belonged, and before she even knew whether she loved her companion or something else, there came already what the language of the unilluminated world called an infectious disease. It was a storm of horror that burst in upon them with elemental suddenness from the alien regions of life, a flaring up of desperate refusal, a guttering descent, a snuffing out, a ghastly visitation upon two human beings clinging to each other and the drowning of an innocent world in vomit, excrement, and fear.