And he felt: “It’s that way now!” And he thought: “As soon as I manage to no longer have any self-centered, egotistic thoughts toward Agathe or even a single ugly feeling of indifference, she draws all qualities out of me the way the Magnetic Mountain draws the nails out of a ship! Morally, I am dissolved into a state like that of the primal atom, where I am neither myself nor her! Could it be that beatitude is like this?!”

But all he said was: “It’s such fun to watch you!”

Agathe blushed and said: “Why is it ‘fun’?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Sometimes you’re self-conscious in my presence,” Ulrich said. “But then you remember that I’m ‘only your brother.’ And at other times when I catch you in circumstances that would be very appealing to a strange man, you’re not embarrassed at all, but then suddenly it occurs to you that this is not for my eyes and tell me to look away...”

“And what’s fun about that?” Agathe asked.

“Maybe it makes one happy to follow someone else with one’s eyes without knowing why,” Ulrich said. “It’s like a child’s love for his things; without the child’s mental powerlessness...”

“Maybe it’s only fun for you,” Agathe replied, “to play brother and sister because you’re sick of playing man and woman?”

“That too,” Ulrich said, watching her. “Love, at its origin, is simply the drive toward closeness and the grasping instinct. It has been divided into two poles, lady and gentleman, with all sorts of mad tensions, frustrations, spasms, and perversions arising in between. We’ve seen enough of this bloated ideology, which is almost as ridiculous as a gastrosophy. I’m convinced most people would be happy if this connection between an epidermal stimulus and the whole of human nature could be canceled out, Agathe! And sooner or later there will come an age of simple sexual companionship, where boy and girl will stand, like-minded and perplexed, before an old heap of broken springs that once drove the mechanisms called Man and Woman!”

“But if I were to tell you that Hagauer and I were pioneers of that age, you would hold it against me!” Agathe replied with a smile as astringent as good unsugared wine.

“I no longer resent anything,” Ulrich said. He smiled. “A warrior unbuckled from his armor. For the first time in ages he feels the air of nature instead of hammered iron on his skin and sees his body becoming so wan and frail that the birds might carry it away!”

And thus, smiling, and simply forgetting to stop smiling, he contemplated his sister sitting on the edge of a table, swinging one leg dressed in a black silk stocking; except for her chemise, all she was wearing was a pair of short panties: but these impressions had detached themselves from their intrinsic meaning, as it were, and become separate, isolated images. “She is my friend who, adorably, represents a woman to me,” Ulrich thought. “What a realistic complication it is that she really is one.”