One could perhaps explain it by saying that Agathe wanted to revenge herself on this man for having let him take too much advantage of her in the past. Ulrich’s fighting spirit, his sportsmanship, his inventiveness in surmounting obstacles, were now aroused, although he was not especially pleased to feel it; it was too much like the effect of a stimulant that moves the superficial emotions while the deeper ones remain quite untouched. Groping for an overview, he gave the conversation a different turn:

“I’ve read some of his work, and I’ve heard of him too,” he said. “As far as I can gather, he’s regarded as a coming man in pedagogy and education.”

“Yes,” Agatha said. “So he is.”

“Judging by what I know of his work, he’s not only a sound educator but a pioneer of reform in higher education. I remember one book of his in which he discussed the unique value of history and the humanities for a moral education on the one hand, and on the other the equally unique value of science and mathematics as intellectual discipline, and then, thirdly, the unique value of that brimming sense of life in sports and military exercise that makes one fit for action. Is that it?”

“I suppose so,” Agatha said, “but did you notice his way with quotations?”

“Quotations? Let me see: I dimly remember noticing something there. He uses lots of quotations. He quotes the classics. Of course, he quotes the moderns too.…Now I’ve got it: He does something positively revolutionary for a schoolmaster—he quotes not merely academic sources but even aircraft designers, political figures, and artists of today….But I’ve already said that, haven’t I?” He ended on that uncertain note with which recollection runs into a dead end.

“What he does,” Agatha added, “with music, for instance, is to go recklessly as far as Richard Strauss, or with painting as far as Picasso, but he will never, even if only to illustrate something that’s wrong, cite a name that hasn’t become more or less established currency in the newspapers, even if it’s only treated negatively.”

That was it. Just what he had been groping for in his memory. He looked up. He was pleased by the taste and the acuity shown in Agathe’s reply.

“So he’s become a leader, over time, by being among the first to follow in time’s train,” he commented with a laugh. “All those who come after him see him already ahead of them! But do you like our leading figures yourself?”

“I don’t know. In any case, I don’t quote them.”

“Still, we ought to give him his due,” Ulrich said. “Your husband’s name stands for a program that many people today regard as the most advanced. His achievement represents a solid small step forward. His rise cannot be long in coming. Sooner or later he will have at least a university chair, even though he has had to toil for his living as a schoolteacher, while as for me, all I ever had to do was go straight along the course laid out for me—and today I’ve come so far that I probably wouldn’t even get a lectureship.”

Agathe was disappointed, which was probably why her face took on a blank, porcelain-smooth, ladylike mask as she sweetly said: “Oh, I don’t know; perhaps you ought to keep on his good side.”

“When do you expect him?” Ulrich asked.

“Not before the funeral; he has no time to spare. But under no circumstances is he to stay in this house—I won’t have it!”

“As you like,” Ulrich decided unexpectedly. “I shall meet him at the station and drop him off at some hotel. And if you want, I’ll tell him, ‘This is where you stay.’ “

Agathe was surprised and suddenly elated.

“That will make him furious, because he’ll have to pay; he was of course counting on staying here with us!” Her expression had instantly changed and regained the look of a wild and mischievous child.

“What is the situation, actually?” her brother asked. “Does the house belong to you, me, or both of us? Is there a will?”

“Papa left a big package for me that’s supposed to contain all we need to know.” They went to the study, which lay beyond the deceased.

Again they moved through candlelight and the scent of flowers, through the field of vision of those two eyes that no longer saw. In the flickering half-darkness Agathe was for the space of a second a shimmering haze of gold, gray, and pink. They found the package holding the will and took it back with them to the tea table, where they then forgot to open it.

For as they sat down again Agathe told her brother that, to all intents and purposes, she had been living apart from her husband, though under the same roof; she didn’t say how long this had been going on.

It made a bad impression on Ulrich at first. When a married woman sees a man as a possible lover, she is likely to treat him to this land of confidence, and although his sister had come out with it in embarrassment, indeed with defiance, in a clumsy and palpable effort to throw down a challenge, he was annoyed with her for not coming up with something more original; he thought she was making too much of it.

“Frankly,” he said, “I have never understood how you could have lived with such a man at all.”

Agathe told him that it was their father’s idea, and what could she have done to stop it?

“But you were a widow by then, not an underage virgin!”

“That’s just it. I had come back to Papa. Everyone was saying that I was still too young to live on my own; even if I was a widow, I was only nineteen. And then I just couldn’t stand it here.”

“Then why couldn’t you have looked for another man? Or studied something and made yourself independent that way?” Ulrich demanded relentlessly.

Agathe merely shook her head. There was a pause before she answered: “I’ve told you already: I’m lazy.”

Ulrich felt that this was no answer.