Just then it occurred to Agathe that Ulrich too was letting his life go by as if it would last forever. “Maybe it’s a mistake that we didn’t meet as old people,” she said to herself, and had a melancholy vision of two banks of fog sinking to the ground in the evening. “They’re not as beautiful as a radiant noon,” she thought, “but what do these two shapeless gray things care how people feel about them! Their hour has come and is as soft as the most glowing noonday hour!” She had nearly turned her back to the mirror, but there was a taste for hyperbole in her mood that suddenly provoked her to turn around again, and now she had to laugh at the memory of a fat couple at a Marienbad spa she had observed years ago, sitting on a green bench and caressing each other with the utmost tenderness and delicacy of feeling. “Their hearts are slim too, beating under all that fat, and because they’re entranced by the inner view, they don’t know how amusing they look from outside,” Agathe told herself in self-reproach and made the face of someone swooning in rapture, trying at the same time to make herself look fat by squeezing her body and squashing it into pudgy folds. When this bout of exuberance had passed, it looked just as though tiny tears of anger had risen to her eyes, and coolly pulling herself together, she returned to a dispassionate, objective scrutiny of her appearance. Although she was considered slender, she detected in her limbs the interesting possibility that they could become heavy. Also her chest was possibly too broad. The very white skin of the face was dimmed by blond hair as though by candles burning in daylight; the nose stood out a little too far, and on one side its almost classical line was dented at the tip. Indeed, it might well be that everywhere in the flame-like basic form a second form was hiding that was broader and more melancholic, like a linden leaf that has fallen among laurel branches. Agathe became curious about herself, as if she were looking at herself for the first time. This could very well be how the men she had become involved with had seen her, and she herself had known nothing about it. There was something unsettling about this feeling. But by some vagary of the imagination, before she could call her memories to account about this, she heard behind everything she had experienced the ardent, long-drawn-out mating cry of the donkey, which had always strangely excited her: it sounds utterly foolish and ugly, but just for that reason there may be no second heroism of love as disconsolately sweet as his. She shrugged her shoulders at the life she had led and turned back to her image with the firm intention of finding a place in it where her appearance was already yielding to age. There were the little areas near the eyes and ears that are the first to develop fine wrinkles that make them look as if something had slept on them, or the round beneath the inner side of the breasts, which so easily loses its definition: it would have given her satisfaction at this moment and a promise of peace to observe a change of this kind, but there was still none to be perceived anywhere, and the beauty of the body floated almost eerily in the depth of the mirror.