But after she had let him finish, his sister asked: “So are you suggesting that we live in a hotel?”

“Definitely not!” Ulrich hastened to assure her. “Except maybe now and then while traveling.”

“And for the rest of the time we’ll build ourselves an arbor on an island or a log cabin in the mountains?”

“We’ll settle in here, of course,” Ulrich replied, more seriously than this conversation warranted. They fell silent for a little while. He had stood up and was walking back and forth in the room. Agathe pretended to be fixing something on the hem of her dress, bending her head below the line on which their eyes had been meeting. Suddenly Ulrich stopped and said with a voice that came out with difficulty but was forthright and sincere: “Dear Agathe, there exists a circle of questions with a large circumference and no center: and all of these questions mean ‘How shall I live?’”

Agathe had also risen, but still did not look at him. She shrugged. “One has to try it!” she said. A rush of blood had risen to her brow; but when she raised her head, her eyes were bright with exuberant high spirits, and the blush lingered briefly only on her cheeks like a passing cloud. “If we’re going to stay together,” she declared, “you will have to help me unpack, put my things away, and change, because I haven’t seen a maid anywhere!”

Now her brother’s bad conscience galvanized his arms and legs to make good, under Agathe’s direction and with her assistance, for his inattentiveness. He cleared out closets like a hunter disemboweling an animal and abandoned his bedroom with a pledge that it was now Agathe’s and that he would find himself a couch somewhere. Eagerly he carried back and forth the objects of daily use that had hitherto lived in their places as quietly as flowers in a flowerbed, awaiting the selecting hand as the only variation in their destiny. Suits piled up on chairs; on the glass shelves in the bathroom, all implements of personal hygiene were carefully partitioned into a gentleman’s and a lady’s department; by the time order had been more or less turned into disorder, only Ulrich’s shiny leather slippers still stood deserted on the floor, looking like an offended lapdog evicted from its basket, by the very pleasantness and triviality of their nature a perfect emblem of disturbed comfort. But there was no time to be touched by this, for Agathe’s suitcases were next, and however few of them there had seemed to be, the abundance of delicately folded things that spread out as they emerged from their confines, blossoming in the air much like the hundred roses a magician pulls from his hat, was all but inexhaustible. These garments had to be hung up and laid down, shaken out and neatly stacked, and since Ulrich assisted in this task as well, it was accompanied by accidents and laughter.