Agathe had never accepted the event that had annihilated her feelings. Deranged by despair, she had lain on her knees at her dying friend’s bedside and convinced herself that she could conjure up again the strength with which she had overcome her own illness as a child; and when his decline advanced nonetheless and his consciousness was already waning, she had, in the rooms of a foreign hotel, stared into that vacant face, incapable of understanding, holding the dying body in her arms without considering the danger and without considering the reality to which an indignant nurse was attending, and done nothing but murmur into his ear for hours: “You can’t, you can’t, you can’t!” But when it was all over she had stood up in amazement, and without believing or thinking anything in particular, simply out of a solitary nature’s self-will and capacity to dream, from that moment of empty astonishment on she had treated what had happened as if it were not final. One can see the first signs of such a tendency in anyone who refuses to believe disastrous news or paints the irrevocable in soothing colors; but the special quality in Agathe’s behavior was the force and extent of this reaction, evident from the start in the eruptive suddenness of her disdain for the world. Since then, when encountering anything new, her mind was set on receiving it less as something that was presently the case than as something highly uncertain, an attitude that was greatly facilitated by the mistrust with which she had long regarded reality; the past, on the other hand, had become petrified by the blow she had suffered, and was worn away by time much more slowly than usually happens with memories. But this had nothing of the fog of dreams, the one-­sidedness and skewed proportions that cry out for a doctor. On the contrary, Agathe went on with her life, outwardly perfectly lucid, unassumingly virtuous, and merely a little bored, in a slightly elevated state of unwillingness to go on living that was now really quite similar to the fever she had suffered with such peculiar willingness as a child. And the fact that in her memory, which never easily dissolved its impressions into generalizations, the horror of the past remained present hour after hour, like a corpse wrapped in a white sheet, made her blissfully happy, despite all the torment of remembering so exactly, for it had the effect of a mysteriously belated hint that all was not yet over, and kept alive, in the derelict state of her inner being, a vague but exalted tension. Of course all this really amounted to was merely that she had lost the meaning of her life and was deliberately putting herself in a condition that did not suit her years; for only old people live by dwelling on the experiences and successes of the past and are no longer affected by the present. But fortunately, at the age Agathe was then, even as one forms resolutions for all eternity, a single year has nearly the weight of half an eternity, and so it was only to be expected that after a while repressed nature and fettered imagination would forcibly reclaim their freedom. The details of how this happened are unimportant; a man whose advances under different circumstances would never have caught her off balance succeeded in becoming her lover, and this attempt at a reenactment ended, after a very short time of fanatical hope, in passionate disenchantment. Agathe now felt herself reviled by both her real life and her unreal life and unworthy of lofty aspirations. She was one of those intense people who are capable of remaining still and watchfully waiting for a long time until at some point they suddenly fall prey to total confusion; and so in her disappointment she soon made another ill-­considered decision that consisted, in short, of punishing herself in a manner opposite to the way in which she had sinned, by condemning herself to share her life with a man who instilled in her a slight revulsion. And this man whom she had sought out for her punishment was Hagauer.