“I have to say that was neither fair nor considerate toward him,” Agathe confessed to herself, and it must be admitted that this was the first time she did so, for fairness and consideration are not popular virtues among young people. Still, her self-punishment in this marriage was not inconsiderable either, and Agathe now examined this matter further. She had gone far afield in her ruminations, and Ulrich too was searching for something in his books and had apparently forgotten their conversation. “In earlier centuries,” she thought, “a person who felt as I did would have entered a convent”—and the fact that she had married instead was not without an innocent comedy that had previously escaped her. This comical aspect, however, which had not been apparent to her youthful mind, was none other than that of our present time, which satisfies the need for escape from the world at worst in a tourist inn, but usually in an Alpine hotel, and even aspires to equip its prisons with attractive furniture. This exemplifies the deep European need not to overdo anything. No European scourges himself any longer, or smears himself with ashes, cuts out his tongue, truly abandons himself, or even just withdraws from all human company, pines away with passion, racks or impales, but everyone does feel an occasional urge to do these things, and so it is hard to tell which is more worth avoiding, the wanting or the not doing. Why then should an ascetic, of all people, starve himself? It will only encourage disturbing fantasies. Rational asceticism consists in having an aversion to eating while maintaining a healthy diet. This kind of asceticism holds out a promise of longevity and permits the spirit a freedom it does not have when it is bound to the body in passionate rebellion! Such bitterly amusing observations, adopted from her brother, now had a fortifying effect on Agathe, for they dissected the “tragic,” which she had long believed in with a kind of fixity to which, in her inexperience, she thought herself obliged, into irony and a passion that had neither a name nor a goal and for that reason alone was not aborted by what she had experienced.