“How unmodern I am!” she thought with a smile as she did so. “I’m sure there are more important things than experiences with love!” But she didn’t believe it.

At this moment it could no more be said that she rejected the thought of entering into illicit relations with her brother than that it was something she wished for. That might depend on the future; but nothing in her present state of mind was definite enough to formulate such a question.

The light painted the crates surrounding her a glaring white and deep black. And a thought came, wearing a similar tragic mask that gave its otherwise simple meaning an uncanny expression, that she was now spending her last evening in the house where she had been born of a woman she had never been able to remember, and of whom Ulrich had also been born. An impression crept up on her from her earliest days, that clowns with deadly serious faces and strange instruments were standing around her. They began to play. Agathe recognized it as a waking dream from her childhood. She could not hear this music, but all the clowns were looking at her. She told herself that at this moment her death would be no loss to anyone or anything, and that for herself it might mean no more than the outer conclusion of an inner extinction. So she thought while the clowns made their music swell all the way up to the ceiling, and she seemed to be sitting on a circus floor covered with sawdust, and tears dropped onto her fingers. It was a feeling of profound futility that she had often felt as a young girl, and she thought: “I suppose I never stopped being childish,” which however did not prevent her from thinking, as of something that looked immeasurably great through her tears, that right at the start of their reunion she and her brother had come face-to-face wearing clown garments much like these. “What does it mean that what I have inside me should have attached itself to my brother, of all people?” she asked herself. And suddenly she was really weeping—out of sheer happiness, it seemed: she could not have given any other reason for it. She shook her head violently, as though there were something inside it that she could neither pull apart nor bring together.

All the while she imagined with natural naivete that Ulrich would surely find an answer to all questions, until the old man came back into the room and was moved by the sight of her emotion. “The gracious young lady. . . ,” he said, likewise shaking his head. Agathe looked at him in confusion, but as soon as she realized the misunderstanding that underlay this expression of sympathy, which had gone out to what he took be her childlike grief, her youthful exuberance returned. “Throw everything you have into the fire, down to your shoes. When you have nothing more, think not even of a shroud and throw yourself naked into the fire,” she said to him. It was an ancient saying which Ulrich had read aloud to her with great delight, and the old man bared his damaged teeth in a smile that betokened understanding of the grave and gentle sweep of the words, which she recited to him with eyes that glowed beneath her tears, and following the movement of his mistress’s hand, which was intended to facilitate his understanding by misdirecting it, he looked at the steep tower of crates that were heaped up almost like a pyre. At the mention of the shroud, he had nodded comprehendingly, eager to follow, though the path the words took seemed to him not quite level; but at the word “naked” he stiffened, and when Agathe repeated her saying, his face had reverted to the mask of the well-trained servant whose expression conveys assurance that he will neither see, hear, nor judge.