Tacitly they agreed to treat everything that happened as a mere interlude. There was a great deal that needed to be changed or re­arranged in their household, which had been clear to them on the very first day, but they did nothing about it, because they shied away from resuming a discussion whose limits could not be foreseen. Ulrich, who had given up his bedroom to Agathe, had settled himself in the dressing room, with the bathroom between them, and had subsequently ceded most of his closet space to her. An offer of sympathy on this account he rejected with a reference to Saint Lawrence and his grill; but it never seriously occurred to Agathe that she might have disrupted her brother’s bachelor existence, because he assured her that he was very happy and because she had only a very vague conception of the degrees of happiness he might have enjoyed previously. She now liked this house, with its unbourgeois layout, the useless extravagance of reception rooms and anterooms around the few usable and now overfilled rooms; it had about it something of the elaborate civility of a bygone age that is defenseless against the self-indulgent boorishness of the present, but sometimes the silent objection of the elegant rooms against the invading disorder was sad, too, like torn and tangled strings on the beautifully carved hull of an ancient instrument. Agathe saw then that her brother had not really chosen this secluded house without feeling or interest, even though he wanted to give that impression, and from its old walls came a language of passion that was neither quite mute nor quite audible. But neither she nor Ulrich admitted to anything more than that they rather enjoyed disarray. They lived with a certain amount of inconvenience, ordered food from a hotel, and derived from all this the somewhat excessive high spirits that can ensue at a picnic where one eats less well on the green earth than one would at the table.