Nor could adequate domestic service be found under these circumstances. The experienced servant whom Ulrich had taken in when he moved into the house had been hired for a brief period only, as he was an old man who was ready to retire and was only waiting for some matter to be settled first; not much could be expected of him, and Ulrich gave him as little to do as possible. The role of chamber­maid fell to Ulrich himself, for the room where a decent maid might have been put up was, like everything else, still at the planning stage, and a few attempts to get over this state of affairs had not led to good results. Thus Ulrich was making great progress as a squire arming his lady knight to set forth on her social conquests. In addition, Agathe had begun to shop for new clothes to supplement her wardrobe. And as the house was nowhere equipped for the needs of a lady, she had developed the habit of using the entirety of it as a dressing room, so that Ulrich, whether he wished to or not, took part in her new acquisitions. The doors between the rooms stood open, his gymnastics equipment served as clotheshorses and hangers, and at times of decision he would be called away from his desk like Cincinnatus from his plow.^* This thwarting of his will to work (which, though in abeyance, was still ready to be called upon) was something he put up with not only because he assumed it would pass but also because it brought him a pleasure that was new to him and was having a rejuvenating effect. His sister’s seemingly idle vivacity crackled in his solitude like a small fire in a long-unused stove. Bright waves of charming gaiety, dark waves of human trust, filled the rooms in which he lived, which as a result lost their nature of a space in which their sole inhabitant moved at the dictates of his own will. But what astonished him above all in this inexhaustible presence that was not his own was that the uncountable trifles of which it consisted added up to something incalculable and utterly different in kind: his impatience with anything that wasted his time, this unquenchable feeling that had been with him all his life, no matter what he had seized on that was considered to be great and important, had to his amazement completely disappeared, and for the first time he was loving his daily life without thinking at all.