Lieutenant Hofmiller is called upon by the wealthy Hungarian baron Kekesfalva's dinner party. Mistakenly asks the baron's daughter, Edith, to a dance, not knowing that she's a cripple. He flees in embarrassment (pity 1x), but returns the next day, tripping over his words to offer an apology (pity 2x). Her grace spares him, and they strike up a friendship. He visits every day, Edith falls in love with him (he's oblivious) and they have a falling out after he, with the help of a fellow officer, talks him into not being beholden to the standing implied coffee date every day. Edith crashes out. Kekesfalva is worried that Dr. Conrad (only person not crippled by pity) is too afraid (out of pity) to give him a straight answer about the viability of his daughter's recovery from her disability and ask's Hofmiller to ask for him, since he's removed-enough from the situation to maybe get a straight answer. Conrad tells Hofmiller about Kekesfalva's own ignoble origins (fleecing the heiress to a great fortune and feeling so guilty for it that he marries her, then inherits the estate he just fleeced her for). Hofmiller takes nothing away from Conrad's incisive commandments not to torture the old man with the allure of recovery, but he folds right away an tells Kekesfalva that there is a new treatment that Condor is sure will completely cure Edith. Conrad is put in a vice because he fears the disappointment at the truth may literally kill Edith, so he lets it go on, charging Hofmiller with the responsibility of fixing it when the time comes as Conrad devises a plan to get her away from the castle, to a PT rehab somewhere else where Hofmiller can't make the situation worse again. Edith suspects this to be the plan, foists herself upon Hofmiller who is still too dear-in-the-headlights to tell her he does not love her, just pities her. Hofmiller wants to resign his post and flee, but Conrad says this would be murder. Out of pity for Kekesfalva and Edith who seems ready to kill herself no matter what he says to her, Hofmiller promises to marry her when she is recovered after the treatment. However, for fear of ridicule and contempt, he denies the engagement in public.

From wiki:

Realizing the mess he's made and the disgrace he's brought his regiment by lying to his fellow soldiers, he plans to kill himself and requests a transfer. He leaves town early that morning without thinking only from the momentum of his decision, but his guilt catches up to him as he waits for his train in Vienna, but he is unable to notify Condor in time. At one of the stops he sends a hasty telegram explaining that he's been transferred but still intends to keep his promise. Unbeknownst to him Franz Ferdinand had been killed that very day and his telegram never made it to the Kekesfalva's. When Edith learns of his public denial of their engagement, she takes her own life. Toni enters World War I blinded by guilt but mechanically following orders.

All Zweigs (both that I've read) are framed as a recounting of a story he was told by another.

'But why? I only meant to act for the best ... If I said something to Kekesfalva it was only out of ... out of ...

I know, I know,’ interrupted Condor. ‘Naturally, he forced it out of you, wrung it from you. I know how he can break down all one’s defences with his desperate persistence. Yes, I know, I know that you only weakened out of pity, out of the best possible motives. But — and I think I’ve already once warned you on this score — pity is a confoundedly two-edged business. Anyone who doesn’t know how to deal with it should keep his hands, and, above all, his heart, off it. It is only at first that pity, like morphia, is a solace to the invalid, a remedy, a drug, but unless you know the correct dosage and when to stop, it becomes a virulent poison. The first few injections do good, they soothe, they deaden the pain. But the devil of it is that the organism, the body, just like the soul, has an uncanny capacity for adaptation. Just as the nervous system cries out for more and more morphia, so do the emotions cry out for more and more pity, in the end more than one can give. Inevitably there comes a moment when one has to say ‘No’, and then one must not mind the other person’s hating one more for this ultimate refusal than if one had never helped him at all. Yes, my dear Lieutenant, one has got to keep one’s pity properly in check, or it does far more harm than any amount of indifference — we doctors know that, and so do judges and myrmidons of the law and pawnbrokers; if they were all to give way to their pity, this world of ours would stand still — a dangerous thing, pity, a dangerous thing! You can see for yourself what your weakness has done.

After Edith kisses Hofmiller he describes the encounter as a man who leans over to sniff a flower, but is attacked by a snake. Kind of a hilarious development where she gets mad at him for pitying her, then apologizes, then throws herself at him.

Turning abruptly away from me, she whispered, at once exhausted and ashamed: ‘Now go, go, you old silly ... go!’

“ went — no, I staggered — out of the room. Before I had reached the end of the dark corridor the last remnants of my strength left me, and my senses reeled so that I had to steady myself by holding on to the wall. So that was it! This was the secret, so belatedly revealed, of her restlessness, her hitherto inexplicable aggressiveness. I was appalled. I felt like one who, stooping innocently over a flower, is stung by an adder. If the hypersensitive creature had struck me, reviled me, spat at me, I should have been less disconcerted, for in view of her uncertain temper I was prepared for anything but this one thing — that she, an invalid, a poor, afflicted cripple, should be able to love, should desire to be loved; that this child, this half-woman, this immature, impotent creature, should have the temerity (I cannot express it otherwise) to love, to desire, with the conscious and sensual love of a real woman. I had envisaged every possibility but this: that a being whom Fate had so maimed, who had not the strength to drag herself along, could dream of a lover, a beloved, beloved, that she should so horribly misunderstand me, who, after all, visited and went on visiting her simply out of pity.

The wretched have a higher capacity for love:

It was only from this moment that I began to have an inkling of the fact (suppressed by most writers) that the outcasts, the branded, the ugly, the withered, the deformed, the despised and rejected, desire with a more passionate, far more dangerous avidity than the happy; that they love with a fanatical, a baleful, a black love, and that no passion on earth rears its head so greedily, so desperately, as the forlorn and hopeless passion of these step-children of God, who feel that they can only justify their earthly existence by loving and being loved. That it is precisely from the lowest abysses of despair that the panic cries and groans of those hungry for love ring out most gruesomely — this was the dread secret which I, in my raw inexperience, had never ventured to suspect. It was not until this moment that the knowledge penetrated my consciousness like a red-hot knife.

Conrad reminds me of the old man from Passage to Inis Mór telling Hofmiller the hard truth about his predicament. Not sure if he is a brilliant man or a conniving rat-fuck, but he asserts that Hofmiller's resignation letter is tantamount to murdering the poor girl who has expressed her love for him. Hofmiller wants to run away and is ashamed (?) of being seen loving a cripple. He also astutely identifies that the reason why the protagonist is repulsed by her love is not because of her actual affliction, but because of the perception of him, engaging with her by his fellow soldiers. Conrad's own wife is blind, so he has ground to stand on here, an also latitude to take personal offense at the implications of Hofmiller's cowardice.

'Why ... that this infatuation is mere childish nonsense. You must talk her out of it.’

‘Talk her out of it? Talk her out of what? Talk a woman out of being in love? Tell her she ought not to feel as she does feel? Not to love when she does love? That would be about the worst thing one could possibly do, and the stupidest into the bargain. Have you ever heard of logic prevailing against passion? Of anyone’s being able to say to a fever: “Fever, cease raging!”, or to a fire, “Fire, stop burning!” A fine, a really kindly thought, to shout at an invalid, a cripple: “For heaven’s sake don’t get it into your head that you can be allowed love like other people! It’s presumptuous of you, a cripple, to show feeling, to expect people to show feeling for you — it’s for you to lie low. Go and stand in the corner. Give up, renounce, all thought of love!” That, apparently, is what you want me to tell the poor girl. But have the goodness to consider the glorious effect of such a step!’

‘But it is you who must ...’

'Why me? You expressly took all the responsibility on yourself. Why should I now assume it?'

He ends his admonition by availing himself:

If you should not feel equal to your task, or if during this week you unwittingly give yourself away, don’t be ashamed — for heaven’s sake don’t be ashamed to tell me! I’ve seen enough naked bodies and broken spirits. You can call on me or ring me up at any time of the day or night; I shall always be ready to come to your aid, for I know what’s at stake.

Conrad definitely a good man, actually.

Love suspects inhibition at every move.

Jillian Rose speaks of this

Some other good quotations from Conrad and Hofmiller respectivey

if you help only one other person, you have made sense of your life

Will power, that demonic force of the heart

The translator's Afterward is incredible. States, correctly, that this book reads as though "it couldn't do with much trimming," and also ties in the relevancy of the book to the outbreak of World War II despite being set just before World War I. All of his character's are full of things left unsaid. The original German title "Ungeduld des Herzens" translates to "Impatience of the Heart."

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