So this did not at all mean that Agathe at that time already intended to kill herself. On the contrary, she feared death exactly the way every young person does when the thought occurs, for instance before falling asleep after a wholesomely spent day: “It can’t be avoided: there will be a day just as fine as today, and I will be dead.” Nor does it make one feel like dying when one has to watch someone else die, and her father’s demise had tormented her with impressions whose horrors had reemerged ever since she had stayed behind in the house after her brother’s departure. But: “I am a little dead”—this was a feeling Agathe had often. And especially at moments like this, just after she had been conscious of her young body’s shapeliness and health, of this taut beauty that in its mysterious composition is as groundless as the decomposition of the elements at death, she could easily fall from a state of happy security into one of trepidation, awe, and silence such as one feels when stepping out of a room full of lively activity and suddenly finding oneself beneath the glitter of the stars. Despite the resolutions that were stirring inside her, and despite her satisfaction at having rescued herself from a failed life, she now felt at a slight remove from herself, and only tenuously connected to herself. Coolly she thought of death as a condition of being released from all toils and illusions, and pictured it as an intimate, gentle lulling to sleep: one lies in God’s hand, and this hand is like a cradle or a hammock slung between two tall trees and faintly swaying in the wind. She imagined death as a great tranquility and fatigue, free of all wanting, all effort, all attention and thought, rather like the pleasant feebleness one feels in one’s fingers when sleep carefully loosens their hold on some last thing in the world they were still holding on to. Without question this indolent and casual conception of dying was consistent with the needs of a person who is not fond of the exertions of living, and in the end she amused herself with the observation that this reminded her of the divan she had brought into her father’s austere drawing room so that she could lie on it, reading—the only change she had made in the house on her own initiative.