It seemed natural to Ulrich that under these circumstances they hadn’t exchanged letters. What would they have had to say to each other? At the time of Agathe’s first marriage, he was, as he now remembered, a lieutenant and confined to a hospital with a bullet wound he had received in a duel. God, what an ass he had been! In fact, strictly speaking, several asses at once! For he realized now that the memory of the dueling lieutenant didn’t belong there; he had been on the verge of becoming an engineer and had something “important” to do that kept him from the family celebration. Later he learned that his sister had loved her husband very much: he no longer remembered who had told him that, but what does “loved him very much” really mean? It’s a manner of speaking. She had married again, and Ulrich could not stand the second husband; that was the one thing he was sure of! He disliked him not only for the personal impression he had of him but for some books by him which he had read, and it was certainly possible that his subsequent forgetting of his sister may have been not entirely unintentional. It was not good of him to have done that; but he had to admit that even during the past year, when he had thought of so many things, he hadn’t remembered her once, not even when he learned of his father’s death. However, at the train station he had asked the old manservant who picked him up whether his brother-in-law had arrived yet, and was happy to hear that Professor Hagauer was not expected until the funeral. And though it would be no more than two or three days till then, it seemed to Ulrich a limitless retreat, which he would now spend with his sister as though they were the most intimate confidants in the world. It would have been useless to ask himself why he felt as he did. Probably the thought of the “unknown sister” was one of those roomy abstractions in which many feelings that are not quite at home anywhere find a place.