Agathe looked at her brother, and there was a quality in her eyes like the crackling of fire in the rain. And when he fell silent, she reproached him: “Now you’ve managed to manoeuver us out of it!”

“You are right,” he admitted. “But here is the strange thing: Even though we’ve boarded it all up like an unsafe well, some remnant drop of this uncanny miracle water is still burning a hole into all our ideals. Not one of them is quite right, not one of them makes us happy; they all point to something that is not there; you know what I mean, we’ve talked enough about that today. Our civilization is a temple of what would be called mania if it were unconfined, but at the same time it is the prison of its confinement, and we don’t know if we are suffering from an excess or a deficiency.”

“Maybe you never dared to give yourself over to it all the way,” Agathe said regretfully, and stepped down from her ladder; for they had let themselves be distracted, first by the books and then by their conversation, from their task of sorting their father’s papers, which had become pressing as the days went by. Now they went back to perusing the instructions and notes concerning the distribution of their inheritance, for the day to which Hagauer had been put off was approaching; but before they had seriously begun doing this, Agathe sat up straight and asked him once more: “To what extent do you yourself believe everything you’ve been telling me?”

Ulrich answered without looking up. “Imagine that in that herd, while your heart is turned away from the world, there is a dangerous bull! Try to really believe that the deadly illness you told me about would have taken a different course if your feelings had not weakened for a second!” Then he raised his head and pointed at the papers beneath his hands. “And law, justice, right proportion? Do you think all that is completely superfluous?”

“So to what extent do you believe?” Agathe repeated.

“Yes and no,” Ulrich said.

“That means no,” Agathe concluded.

Here chance intervened in their talk. At the moment when Ulrich, who was neither inclined to resume the discussion nor calm enough to think about practical matters, gathered up the papers that were spread out before him, something fell to the ground. It was a loose packet of all sorts of things that had been inadvertently pulled out, together with the will, from a corner of the desk drawer, where it might have lain for decades without its owner’s knowing. Ulrich looked at it distractedly as he picked it up, and recognized his father’s handwriting on several pages; it was not the script of his old age but that of his prime. Looking more closely, he saw that in addition to handwritten pages, the bundle contained playing cards, photographs, and various knickknacks, and now he quickly realized what he had found. It was the desk’s “poison drawer.” Here were painstakingly recorded jokes, most of them smutty; nude photographs; postcards, to be sent sealed, of plump dairymaids whose panties could be opened at the back; decks of cards that looked quite proper but, when held against the light, showed horrid things; manikins that produced offensive language when their belly was squeezed; and more of that kind. No doubt the old gentleman had forgotten the things lying in that drawer, or else he would have destroyed them in time. They obviously dated from those years in which quite a few aging bachelors and widowers warm themselves with such indecencies, but Ulrich blushed at this exposure of his father’s unprotected fantasies, now severed from the flesh by death. Their relevance to the conversation that had just broken off was immediately clear to him. Nevertheless, his first impulse was to destroy these documents before Agathe had seen them. But Agathe had already noticed that something unusual had come into his hands, so he changed his mind and called her over.