"In all seriousness. It is no time for trying one's skill at pleasantry or dialectic hair-splitting."
"I am curious to know what you mean. Tell me frankly what you think about it."
"Innstetten, your situation is awful and your happiness in life is destroyed. But if you kill the lover your happiness in life is, so to speak, doubly destroyed, and to your sorrow over a wrong suffered will be added the sorrow over a wrong done. Everything hinges on the question, do you feel absolutely compelled to do it? Do you feel so injured, insulted, so indignant that one of you must go, either he or you? Is that the way the matter stands?"
"I don't know."
"You must know."
Innstetten sprang up, walked to the window, and tapped on the panes, full of nervous excitement. Then he turned quickly, stepped toward Wüllersdorf and said: "No, that is not the way the matter stands."
"How does it stand then?"
"It amounts to this—that I am unspeakably unhappy. I am mortified, infamously deceived, and yet I have no feeling of hatred or even of thirst for revenge. If I ask myself 'why not?' on the spur of the moment, I am unable to assign any other reason than the intervening years. People are always talking about inexpiable guilt. That is undeniably wrong in the sight of God, but I say it is also in the sight of man. I never should have believed that time, purely as time, could so affect one. Then, in the second place, I love my wife, yes, strange to say, I love her still, and dreadful as I consider all that has happened, I am so completely under the spell of her loveliness, the bright charm peculiarly her own, that in spite of myself I feel in the innermost recesses of my heart inclined to forgive."
Wüllersdorf nodded. "I fully understand your attitude, Innstetten, I should probably feel the same way about it. But if that is your feeling and you say to me: 'I love this woman so much that I can forgive her everything,' and if we consider, further, that it all happened so long, long ago that it seems like an event in some other world, why, if that is the situation, Innstetten, I feel like asking, wherefore all this fuss?"
"Because it must be, nevertheless. I have thought it over from every point of view. We are not merely individuals, we belong to a whole, and have always to take the whole into consideration. We are absolutely dependent. If it were possible to live in solitude I could let it pass. I should then bear the burden heaped upon me, though real happiness would be gone. But so many people are forced to live without real happiness, and I should have to do it too, and I could. We don't need to be happy, least of all have we any claim on happiness, and it is not absolutely necessary to put out of existence the one who has taken our happiness away. We can let him go, if we desire to live on apart from the world. But in the social life of the world a certain something has been worked out that is now in force, and in accordance with the principles of which we have been accustomed to judge everybody, ourselves as well as others. It would never do to run counter to it. Society would despise us and in the end we should despise ourselves and, not being able to bear the strain, we should fire a bullet into our brains. Pardon me for delivering such a discourse, which after all is only a repetition of what every man has said to himself a hundred times. But who can say anything now? Once more then, no hatred or anything of the kind, and I do not care to have blood on my hands for the sake of the happiness taken away from me. But that social something, let us say, which tyrannizes us, takes no account of charm, or love, or limitation. I have no choice. I must."