He even gasped, a little too obligingly, when Agathe, with the earnestness women bring to such matters, offered for his admiration the thousand dainty things that she had bought. There is a droll oddity in the nature of the human female that renders her, though equal in intelligence, more sensitive than the male and precisely for that reason more receptive to the idea of resorting to the brutal ploys of self-adornment, by which she deviates even further from rationally ordered humanity than he does in his masculine way. Ulrich acted as if this trait irresistibly compelled his sympathetic engagement. And perhaps that was really the case. For the many small, endearingly silly inspirations he was presented with: wreathing oneself in glass beads, crimping one’s hair with a curling iron, enlisting the inane patterns of lace and embroidery, applying seductive colors with a determination that is nothing short of ruthless—these baits so akin to the aluminum stars one can win at a fairground shooting gallery that every intelligent woman sees through them without in the slightest losing her taste for them—began to enmesh him in the threads of their gleaming lunacy. For the moment one takes anything, no matter how foolish or lacking in taste, seriously on an equal footing, it begins to display its own harmonious order, the intoxicating scent of its amour propre, its innate urge to play and to please. This was what happened to Ulrich in the course of the operations that were required of him as he assisted Agathe with her regalia. He fetched and carried, admired, appraised, was asked for advice, helped with trial fittings. He stood with Agathe in front of the mirror. Nowadays, when a woman’s appearance resembles that of a well-plucked chicken that offers no inconvenience, it is difficult to imagine her earlier appearance in all its allure to a long-deferred appetite, a charm that has in the meantime fallen prey to ridicule: the long skirt, seemingly stitched to the floor by the tailor and yet miraculously ambulant, enclosed a second layer of other, secret light skirts beneath it, pastel-colored silken petals whose gently swaying movement then suddenly gave way to white, even softer tissues, and it was only the delicate foam of those ultimate garments that finally touched the body; and if this attire resembled waves in that it wed an undertow of enticement with a firm rebuff to the eye, it was also an ingenious system of way stations and fortifications ranged around expertly defended wonders and with all its unnaturalness an artfully curtained theater of love, whose breathtaking darkness was lightened only by the dim lamp of the imagination. Ulrich was now seeing this epitome of preliminaries dismantled daily, deconstructed, as it were, from the inside. And though a woman’s secrets had long since ceased to be a mystery to him, or perhaps rather because he had always only hurried through them like vestibules or front yards, they took on a completely different importance now that there was no gateway for him and no goal. The tension that lay in all these things rebounded. Ulrich would have been hard put to say what changes it wrought in him. He rightly regarded himself as a man of masculine temperament, and it seemed reasonable to him that such a man might be tempted to see what he has so often desired from its own side, but at times it became almost eerie and he would rebel against it with a laugh.