Already in the morning after her brother left, Agathe had observed her appearance very closely: it had begun by accident with her face, when her glance had fallen on it and not come back out of the mirror. She was held fast the way sometimes one may not feel like walking at all, yet walks another hundred steps and then another hundred and a hundred more all the way to some object that comes into view only now, at which point one really decides to turn back, but again does not do so. In this way, without vanity, she was captivated by the landscape of her self that lay before her behind a vaporous film of glass. She moved on to her hair, which was still like light velvet; she opened the collar of her reflection’s dress and slipped the dress off its shoulders; finally, she undressed it completely and examined it down to the rosy nails, where the body ends in hands and feet and scarcely belongs to itself anymore. Everything was still like the sparkling day approaching its zenith: ascendant, pure, exact, and afloat on that slowing arc of becoming that is the time before noon and that manifests itself in a human being or a young animal as it does in a ball that has almost, but not quite, reached its highest point in the air. “Maybe it’s passing through that point at this moment,” Agathe thought. This notion frightened her. But actually it could take a while yet: she was only twenty-seven. Her body, as uninfluenced by athletic coaches and masseurs as it was by childbearing and the tasks of motherhood, had been formed by nothing but its own growth. If it could have been set naked into one of those grand and lonely landscapes that are formed by the sky-facing side of a high mountain range, the vast, infertile, billowing swell of such an elevation would have carried her like a pagan goddess. In nature of this kind, noon does not pour down swaths of light and heat, it merely seems to rise beyond its zenith for a while and imperceptibly shades into the sinking, hovering beauty of the afternoon. From the mirror came the slightly uncanny sense of that imponderable hour.