He wanted to wait and hear what she would say. But suddenly he was again acutely aware that she was, after all, a woman who must have had her experiences, a fact of which he had been completely unaware during their more profound conversations. But her face gave no sign of what she was thinking; she looked gravely and calmly at her father’s illicit legacy. From time to time she smiled openly, but without much animation. So Ulrich himself spoke, despite his resolve. “There you have it, the last vestige of mysticism!” he said with angry amusement. “Sharing the same drawer, the testament with its stern moral admonitions and this swill!” He had stood up and was walking back and forth in the room. And no sooner had he begun to talk than his sister’s silence spurred him on to new words.

“You asked me what I believe,” he began. “I believe that all the precepts of our morality are concessions to a society of savages.

“I believe none of them are right.

“There’s another meaning glimmering behind them. A fire that ought to melt them down so they can be recast. I believe that nothing is final.

“I believe there is no equilibrium, but everything wants to rise by the leverage of everything else.

“That’s what I believe: that was born with me or I with it.”

After each sentence he had halted, for he was speaking softly and needed somehow to give emphasis to his confession. His eye was now caught by the classical plaster figures that stood on top of the book shelves; he saw a Minerva, a Socrates; he remembered that Goethe had placed an over-life-size plaster head of Juno in his room. This predilection felt alarmingly remote to him: what had once been a flourishing idea had since withered into a dead classicism. Had become the rearguard righteousness and duty-bound constriction of his father’s contemporaries. Had been in vain.

“The morality that has been handed down to us,” he said, “is like being sent out on a swaying rope that’s slung across an abyss with no other advice than ‘At all times keep a rigid posture.’

“It seems that, without any action on my part, I was born with a different morality.

“You asked me what I believe! I believe I can receive a thousand proofs that something is good and beautiful, it will leave me indifferent, and I will take my bearings solely from one indication: Does this make me rise or sink?

“Does it breathe life into me or not?

“Is it merely my tongue and brain that speak of it or the radiant shudder in my fingertip?

“But I can’t prove anything either.

“And I’m even convinced that a person who gives in to this other morality is lost. He will end up in twilight. In fog and inane nonsense. In spineless ennui.

“If you remove the unequivocal from life, what remains is a carp pond without a pike.

“I believe, then, that our meanest, nastiest trait is the good angel that protects us!