63 The Inner Acoustics of Emptiness

As an excuse to meet with Ulrich again, Bonadea decides she needs to talk to him about winning "Diotima over to Moosbruger's cause." But Bonadea is more interested in Diotima than Moosbrugger:

She had heard enough about Diotima's virtues not to be jealous; rather, she envied and admired this woman, who could hold the interest of Bonadea's beloved [Ulrich] without making improper concessions to him. . . . Her term for herself was "passionate," by which she understood both her dishonorable state and an honorable excuse for it. But she admired cool women with much the same feeling with which unfortunate owners of perpetually damp hands put their hands in a hand that is particularly dry and lovely.

But her aim in visiting Ulrich is also to reinstate their affair. So their conversation about the ethics of Moosbrugger's situation is less about him than about them -- something of which Ulrich is all too aware:

His weariness was now the same transparent gold as his drink on the table.  I've been talking nonsense for the last half hour too, he thought. But this diminished state was comfortable enough. The only thing he feared was that it might occur to Bonadea to come and sit down next to him. There was only one way to forestall this: keep talking.

Ulrich, being Ulrich, cannot help being philosophical about the temptation he is going to succumb to:

But this inner freedom consists of being able to think whatever one likes; it means knowing, in every human situation, why one doesn't need to be bound by it, but never knowing what one wants to be bound by!" . . .  that moral ambivalence that marked almost all his contemporaries and was the disposition of his generation, or perhaps their fate.  His connections to the world had become pale, shadowy, and negative. What right did he have to treat Bonadea badly? It was always the same frustrating talk they had, over and over again; it arose from the inner acoustics of emptiness, where a shot resounds twice as loudly and echoes on and on. 

Unfortunately, although Bonadea insists on "intellectual conversation, she "always missed the great idea that was supposed to go along with the great excitement she felt through the nearness of a lover."

Of course, the narrator, in his own ironic way, is sympathetic: "Unfortunately, this can, of course, by said of life itself, which contains a lot of excitement and little sense, but Bonadea did knot know this, and she tried to express some great idea."

Bonadea is saved from having to fully express her "great idea" by the "physical illusion" of "a flea."  As a result, Ulrich must help her search for the flea.  Here the narrator has a great deal of fun: "A flea," he declares, "favors the same regions as a lover; her stocking was searched down to the shoe; her blouse had to be unbuttoned in the front."

The result, with which the chapter concludes, is that "Ulrich smiled with unexpected friendliness" and Bonadea "burst into tears, like a little girl who has misbehaved."