He said this calmly, almost in the manner of a professional evaluation; how easily he was diverted! Agathe was upset. Stubbornly she said: “Of course I’m in motion, but that’s not what I’m talking about! I want to know where I almost arrived at back then!” She was also annoyed, without meaning to be, simply because her excitement had to express itself somehow. Nevertheless, she went on talking in the direction her feelings had originally taken, and she felt quite dizzy between the tenderness of her words and the anger in the background. She spoke about that wondrous state of heightened receptivity and sensitivity that produces a welling up and subsiding of sense impressions, giving rise to a feeling of being in touch with all things, an effortless giving and receiving as if afloat in the soft mirror of a sheet of water; that marvelous sense of outer and inner boundlessness and self-abandonment that love and mysticism have in common! Of course Agathe did not say it in such words, which already entail an explanation, but merely strung passionate fragments of memory into a sequence. But though Ulrich had given much thought to these things, he too was unable to explain such experiences. Above all he did not know whether to attempt an explanation in the terms of the experience itself or by the usual procedures of rational thought. Both were equally natural to him, but not to his sister’s evident passion. What he said in reply, therefore, was merely a mediation, a kind of testing of the possibilities. He pointed out how, in the exalted state they were speaking of, a remarkable affinity exists between thinking and moral feeling, such that every thought is felt as a joy, an event, and a gift and does not wander off into the storage rooms nor attach itself to the sentiments of acquisition and mastery, retention and observation, so that, in the head no less than in the heart, the pleasure of self-possession is replaced by a limitless giving of oneself and intertwining of oneself and others. “Once in your life,” Agathe replied then with rapturous conviction, “everything you do is done for someone else. You see the sun shining for him. He is everywhere, you yourself are nowhere. And yet this is not ‘egotism à deux,’ because the same thing must be happening with the other person. In the end the two hardly exist for each other anymore, and what’s left is a world for people all in twos, which consists of mutual recognition, surrender, friendship, and selflessness!”

In the darkness of the room her cheek glowed with ardor like a rose standing in the shadow. And Ulrich pleaded: “Let us speak more soberly now; there tends to be far too much humbug in these matters!” And that too seemed right to her. Maybe it was due to her anger, which had still not dissipated, that her delight was somewhat dampened by the reality he was invoking; but it was not an unpleasant sensation, this unsteady trembling of the borderline.