Ulrich noticed this and apologized, offering some facetious explanations. He told her how he had come to acquire his house and recounted its history in detail, beginning with the antlers, which he owned without having ever gone hunting, and ending with the boxing ball, which he set dancing for Agathe’s benefit. Agathe looked at everything again with disquieting seriousness and even turned her head when they left a room, as if to confirm her impression. Ulrich tried to be amused by this examination, but as it went on he began to feel embarrassed about his house. Something that was usually concealed by habit now became apparent: he occupied only the most necessary rooms, so that the other rooms hung off them like disheveled finery. When they were sitting down together after the tour of the house, Agathe asked: “But why did you do it, if you don’t like it?”

Her brother provided her with tea and everything the house had to offer, and insisted on giving her a hospitable welcome, belated though it was, so that this second reunion should not be inferior to the first with respect to creaturely comfort. Hurrying back and forth, he assured her: “I did it all haphazardly, incorrectly, and in such a way that the place has nothing to do with me.”

“But it really looks very nice,” Agathe now consoled him.

Ulrich remarked that if he had done it differently, it would probably have been even worse. “I can’t stand homes that are custom-made to match their owner’s personality,” he declared. “It would make me feel as if I had ordered myself from an interior decorator!”

And Agathe said, “Homes like that scare me too.”

“Even so, it can’t stay like this,” Ulrich corrected himself. He was sitting with her at the table now, and the mere fact that from now on they would always be having their meals together raised a number of questions. The realization that all sorts of things would have to be different took him by surprise; he felt that he was required to exert himself in an utterly unfamiliar way, and at first he had the zeal of a beginner. “A person alone,” he said, countering his sister’s indulgent readiness to leave everything as it was, “can have a weakness: it will blend in with his other qualities and disappear among them. But when two share a weakness, its weight doubles in comparison with the qualities they don’t have in common and comes to look like a deliberate avowal.”

Agathe could not see that.

“In other words, as brother and sister we can’t do some things that each of us have felt free to do on our own; which is precisely why we have come together.”

That appealed to Agathe. Still, his negative way of putting it, that they were together only in order not to do something, felt incomplete to her, and after a while, returning to the subject of his furnishings and how they had been sent piecemeal by a number of elegant firms, she asked: “I still don’t quite get it. Why did you furnish your house like this if you didn’t think it was right?”