“So you had some special reason for marrying Hagauer?”

“Yes.”

“You were in love with someone you couldn’t have?”

Agathe hesitated. “I loved my first husband.”

Ulrich regretted he had used the word “love” so glibly, as though he regarded the importance of the social arrangement it refers to as inviolable. “Trying to comfort the grieving is no better than handing a dry crust to a beggar,” he thought. Nevertheless, he felt tempted to go on in the same vein. “And then you realized what you’d let yourself in for, and you started to make trouble for Hagauer?” he suggested.

“Yes,” she admitted, “but not right away—quite late,” she added. “Very late, in fact.”

At this point they got into a little argument.

These confessions were visibly costing Agathe an effort, even though she was making them of her own accord and evidently, as was to be expected at her age, saw in her sex life an important subject of general conversation. From the first she seemed ready to take her chances on his sympathy or lack of it; she wanted his trust and was determined, not without candor and passion, to win her brother over. But Ulrich, still in the mood to dispense moral guidance, could not yet meet her halfway. For all his strong-mindedness he was by no means always free of those same prejudices he rejected intellectually, having too often let his life go one way and his mind another. For he had more than once exploited and misused his power over women, with a hunters delight in catching and observing his quarry, so he had almost always seen the woman as the prey struck down by the amorous male spear. The lust of humiliation to which the woman in love subjects herself was fixed in his mind, while the man is very far from feeling a comparable surrender. This masculine notion of female weakness before male power is still quite common today, although with the successive waves of new generations more modern concepts have arisen, and the naturalness with which Agathe treated her dependence on Hagauer offended her brother. It seemed to him that his sister had suffered defilement without being quite aware of it when she subjected herself to the influence of a man he disliked and went on enduring it for years. He did not say so, but Agathe must have read something of the kind in his face, for she suddenly said:

“After all, I couldn’t simply bolt the moment I had married him; that would have been hysteria!”

Ulrich was suddenly jerked out of his role as elder brother and dispenser of edifying narrow-mindedness.

“Would it really be hysteria to feel disgusted and draw all the necessary conclusions?” He tried to soften this by following it up with a smile and looking at his sister in the friendliest possible manner.

Agathe looked back at him, her face somehow rendered defenseless with the effort of deciphering the expression on his.

“Surely a normal healthy person is not so sensitive to distasteful circumstances?” she persisted. “What does it matter, after all?”

Ulrich reacted by pulling himself together, not wanting to let his mind be ruled by one part of himself. He was once more all objective intelligence. “You’re quite right,” he said. “What happens doesn’t really matter. What counts is the system of ideas by which we understand it, and the way it fits into our personal outlook.”

“How do you mean?” Agathe asked dubiously.

Ulrich apologized for putting it so abstractly, but while he was searching for a more easily accessible formulation, his brotherly jealousy reasserted itself and influenced his choice of terms.

“Suppose that a woman we care about has been raped,” he offered. “From a heroic perspective, we would have to be prepared for vengeance or suicide; from a cynical-empirical standpoint, we would expect her to shake it off like a duck shedding water; and what would actually happen nowadays would probably be a mixture of these two. But this lack of a touchstone within ourselves is more sordid than all the rest.”

However, Agathe did not accept this way of putting it either. “Does it really seem so horrible to you?” she asked simply.

“I don’t know. I thought it must be humiliating to live with a person one doesn’t love. But now…just as you like.”

“Is it worse than a woman who wants to marry less than three months after a divorce having to submit to an examination by an officially appointed gynecologist to see whether she’s pregnant, because of the laws of inheritance? I read that somewhere.” Agathe’s forehead seemed to bulge with defensive anger, and the little vertical furrow between her eyebrows appeared again. “And they all put up with it, if they have to!” she said disdainfully.

“I don’t deny it,” Ulrich responded. “Everything that actually happens passes over us like rain and sunshine. You’re probably being much more sensible than I in regarding that as natural. But a man’s nature isn’t natural; it wants to change nature, so it sometimes goes to extremes.” His smile was a plea for friendship, and his eyes saw how young she looked. When she got excited her face did not pucker up but smoothed out even more under the stress going on behind it, like a glove within which the hand clenches into a fist.

“I’ve never thought about it in such general terms,” she now said. “But after listening to you, I am again reminded that I’ve been leading a dreadfully wrong land of life.”

“It’s only because you’ve already told me so much, of your own accord, without coming to the point,” said her brother, lightly acknowledging this concession in response to his own.