And Agathe asked: “Is there really no love?”

“There is!” Ulrich said. “But it’s an exceptional case. We need to make some distinctions: First, there is a physical experience that belongs to the class of epidermal stimuli; this can be aroused without any moral paraphernalia, even without emotions, as something purely agreeable and pleasant. In the second case there are usually emotions that become intensely associated with the physical experience, but only in ways that, with small variations, are the same for everyone; these peak moments of love I would be inclined to regard as belonging to the physical-mechanical domain rather than that of the soul. And finally there is the soul’s own experience of loving: but that has no necessary connection with the two other parts. One can love God, one can love the world; and maybe one can only love God or the world. At any rate, love of a human being is not necessarily involved. But if it is, the physical side pulls the whole world in toward itself, turning it inside out, so to speak—” Ulrich interrupted himself.

Agathe had flushed a deep red.

If Ulrich had deliberately selected and arranged his words with the intention of surreptitiously suggesting to Agathe the act of physical love they inescapably connoted, he would have achieved his purpose.

He looked around for matches, merely to interrupt the unintended shift in their relationship that had occurred.

“At any rate,” he said, “love, when it is love, is an exceptional case and can’t serve as a model for everyday behavior.”

Agathe had reached for the corners of the tablecloth and wrapped it around her legs. “Wouldn’t strangers, if they could see and hear us, think there was something perverse in our feelings?” she suddenly asked.

“Nonsense!” Ulrich maintained. “What each of us feels is the shadowy doubling of one’s own self in the other’s opposite nature. I am a man, you are a woman; it’s widely believed that every human being bears within himself or herself the shadowlike or repressed opposite of each of his or her qualities: at any rate one possesses the longing for it, if one is not hopelessly satisfied with oneself. So here my counterself has come to light and slipped into you, and yours into me, and they feel grand in their transposed bodies, simply because they don’t have a great deal of respect for their former environs and the view to be had from there.”

Agathe thought: “He’s said a lot more about all this before. Why is he diluting it?”

What Ulrich said was, of course, consistent with the life they were leading as companions who occasionally, when the company of others leaves them free, marvel at the fact that they are a man and a woman but at the same time twins. When such an understanding exists between two people, their separate relations with the world take on the charm of an invisible game of hide-and-seek involving swapped clothes and bodies and a cheerful hoodwinking of those who do not suspect their two-in-one, one-in-two duplicity. But this playful and all-too-emphatic merriment—the way children sometimes deliberately amplify the noise they are naturally making!—belied the gravity that sometimes, from a great height, laid its shadow on the hearts of brother and sister, making them fall inadvertently silent. One evening, for instance, when by chance they encountered each other again before going to bed and Ulrich saw his sister in a long nightgown, he wanted to make a joke and said: “If this were a hundred years ago, I would have wanted to cry out: ‘My angel!’ Too bad that expression is out of fashion!” Then he fell silent, taken aback, and thought: “Isn’t that the only word I should use for her?! Not friend, not woman! Also: ‘Heavenly creature’! People used to say that. Ridiculously high-flown, but it’s still better than not having the courage to believe oneself.”