At this moment it struck Agathe as really strange that she was Frau Hagauer, and the difference between the densely defined relationship that was constituted thereby and the inward wake of uncertainty that flowed back to her from it was so strong that she herself seemed to be standing there without a body, while the body in the mirror seemed to belong to Frau Hagauer; and it was up to Frau Hagauer to come to terms with that body, since it had pledged itself to circumstances that were beneath its dignity. Even in this there was something of that buoyant delight in being alive that can sometimes resemble fright, and the first thing Agathe decided, after hastily getting dressed, led her into her bedroom to look for a capsule that had to be in her luggage. This small airtight capsule, which had been in her possession for almost as long as she had been married to Hagauer, and from which she never parted, contained a tiny amount of a drab-looking substance she had been promised was a deadly poison. Agathe remembered certain sacrifices she had needed to make in order to acquire this forbidden substance, about which she knew only what she had been told about its effect, along with one of those chemical names that sound like a magic formula which the uninitiated must memorize without understanding it. But apparently all the devices that bring the end a little closer, like the possession of poison or weapons or the pursuit of survivable adventures, belong to the romanticism of joie de vivre; and it may be that the course of most people’s lives is so depressed, so erratic, with so much darkness in the light and altogether so perverse that life’s indwelling joy can only be released by a far-off possibility of putting an end to it. Agathe felt reassured when her eyes lit on the small metal object that appeared to her, in the uncertainty that lay ahead, as a bringer of luck and a talisman.