That was how Ulrich spoke. Loosely. Shifting in tone and mood. Agathe did not answer; her eyes were still shut, but she was smiling.

Ulrich said: “I no longer know what I’m telling you. I don’t think I can get back to the beginning.”

They were silent for a while. He was able to contemplate his sister’s face at leisure, since it was not defended by the gaze of her eyes. It lay there as a piece of naked body, like women when they are alone with each other in a bathhouse. The feminine, unguarded, natural cynicism of this sight, not intended for men’s eyes, still exerted an unaccustomed effect on Ulrich, even though it was no longer as intense as in their first days together, when Agathe had immediately claimed her sisterly right to talk to him without hiding her soul behind veils of decorum, since for her he was not a man like others. He remembered the mixture of surprise and fright he had felt as a boy when he had seen a pregnant woman on the street, or a mother breastfeeding her baby: secrets carefully withheld from the boy suddenly bulged, full-blown and unembarrassed in the sun. And perhaps he had been carrying vestiges of such impressions about with him for a long time, because suddenly it seemed to him that he felt entirely free of them. That Agathe was a woman with all sorts of experiences in her past was a pleasant and comfortable thought; there was no need to guard one’s speech as with a young girl, indeed it struck him as touchingly natural that with a mature woman everything was already morally less constrained. He also felt a need to protect her, to make up to her for something or other by being kind to her in some way. He resolved to do everything he possibly could for her. He even resolved to find her another husband. And this need for kindness recovered for him, though he barely noticed, the lost thread of the conversation.

“Probably our self-love changes during the years of sexual maturation,” he said without transition. “Because there, a meadow of tenderness in which one had been playing suddenly gets mowed down to produce fodder for one particular instinct.”

“To make the cow give milk!” Agathe supplemented after the slightest pause, mischievously and with dignity, but without opening her eyes.

“Yes, I suppose it’s all connected,” Ulrich said, and continued: “So there is a moment when our life loses almost all its tenderness and contracts into that one particular operation, which then remains supercharged with it: Doesn’t it seem to you too as if there were a horrible drought that prevails everywhere on earth, except for one place where it never stops raining?!”

Agathe said: “It seems to me that as a child I loved my dolls more fiercely than I’ve ever loved a man.”

“What did you do with them?” Ulrich asked. “Did you give them away?”

“Who could I have given them to? I laid them to rest in the kitchen stove.”