But actually, amidst all these activities, Ulrich could think of only one thing, constantly, over and over: that all his life and still a few hours ago he had been alone. And now Agathe was here. This little sentence: “Agathe is here now,” repeated itself in waves, like the astonishment of a little boy who has just been given a present; something about it had an inhibiting effect on the mind, but on the other hand also an utterly incomprehensible fullness of presence, and all in all it kept coming back to that little statement: “Agathe is here now.” “So she’s tall and slender?” Ulrich thought, observing her secretly. But that didn’t describe her at all: she was shorter than he was, and she was broad-shouldered. “Is she attractive?” he wondered. You couldn’t say that either: her proud nose, for example, was slightly turned upward when viewed from one side, which exerted a far more potent charm than mere attractiveness. “Is she actually beautiful?” Ulrich asked himself in an oddly whimsical way. For the question was not an easy one for him, even though as a woman, if one left convention aside, Agathe was a stranger to him. After all, there is no such thing as an inner prohibition against looking at a blood relation with sexual desire; that is mere custom, or it can be explained along the detours of morality and social hygiene; besides, the fact that Ulrich and Agathe had not grown up together had prevented them from developing the sterilized brother-sister feeling that prevails in the European family: nevertheless, convention alone initially sufficed to rob the feelings they had for each other, even the harmless feeling in the mere thought of her beauty, of an ultimate keenness whose absence Ulrich sensed at that moment by his own distinct surprise. To find something beautiful probably means, first of all, to find it: whether it is a landscape or a woman, there it lies, gazing back on the charmed finder and appearing to have been waiting solely and exclusively for him; and so, with this delight in the fact that she now belonged to him and wanted to be discovered by him, he felt immensely fond of his sister, but still he thought: “One can’t find one’s own sister truly beautiful; at the most, one can be flattered that others fancy her.” But then, where in the past there had been silence, he heard her voice for minutes at a time, and what was her voice like? Waves of fragrance accompanied the movement of her clothes, and what was this scent like? Her motions were now a knee, now a delicate finger, now an unruly lock of hair. The only thing one could say about it was that it was there. It was there where before there had been nothing. The difference in sheer intensity between the most vivid moment of thinking about the sister he had left behind and the emptiest present moments was still as great and as distinctly pleasant as when a shaded spot is filled with the scent of wild herbs opening to the light and warmth of the sun.