Agathe was aware that her brother was watching her, but she did not let him know that. During lulls in their talk, when she felt his gaze follow her movements, in the pauses between one remark and the response to it, which were not so much a suspension as a glide through silence, like a car coasting over a deep and treacherous spot with its motor turned off, she too enjoyed the hyperimmediacy and calm intensity of their reunion. And when all the unpacking and putting away was done and Agathe was alone in the bath, an adventure ensued that threatened to burst like a wolf into this gentle pasture for the eyes, for she had undressed down to her underwear in a room where Ulrich now, smoking cigarettes, kept watch over her belongings. With the water swirling around her, she wondered what she should do. There was no maid, so ringing or calling out was not going to be of much help. Apparently her only recourse was to wrap herself in Ulrich’s bathrobe, which was hanging on the wall, knock on the door, and send him out of the room. But Agathe cheerfully doubted whether, in view of the grave familiarity that, if not already full-fledged, had just been born between them, it was permissible for her to conduct herself like a young lady and beg Ulrich to withdraw, so she decided not to acknowledge any equivocal femininity and to appear before him as the natural friend and companion he must see in her even in scanty clothing.

But when she resolutely entered the room, they both felt an unexpected stirring of the heart. Both tried not to be embarrassed. For a moment they were unable to divest themselves of the inconsequence that allows near nudity at the beach but in a room turns the hem of a chemise or panties into the secret path of romantic fantasy. Ulrich smiled awkwardly as Agathe, with the light of the antechamber behind her, stood in the open door looking like a silver statue lightly veiled in a smokelike shroud of batiste; whereupon, with a voice that was much too emphatically casual, she asked for her stockings and dress, which turned out to be in the next room. Ulrich showed her the way, and to his secret delight she strode off a little too boyishly, savoring the difference with a kind of defiance, as women tend to do when they don’t feel themselves protected by their skirts. A little later there was a new development when Agathe found herself half-sheathed in her dress and half-caught in it and had to call Ulrich for help. As he was fiddling with the hooks and fastenings at the back of it, she felt, without sisterly jealousy, but rather with a sense of convenience, that he was quite adept at finding his way around women’s clothes, and she herself moved nimbly when the nature of the procedure required her to do so.

Bent close over the supple, tender, and yet firm skin of her shoulders, intently given over to the unaccustomed task, which raised a flush on his brow, Ulrich was courted by a feeling that could not be quite put into words, unless one were to say that his body was equally assailed by a sense of having a woman and not having a woman very close to him; but one could just as well have said that though he was doubtlessly standing in his own shoes, he nevertheless felt drawn out of himself and over to her as if he had been given a second, far more beautiful body for his own.