Then Ulrich summed up everything that he had said with the assertion: “What made us turn toward each other from the first moment could really be called a life of moonlit nights!” And Agathe breathed a deep sigh. That could mean any number of things, but probably it meant: Why don’t you know a magic spell against our being separated at the last moment? She sighed so naturally and confidingly that she did not even notice it.

And this in turn started a movement that inclined them toward each other and kept them apart. Every strong excitement that two people have experienced together to the end leaves behind in them the naked intimacy of exhaustion. Even a quarrel will do that; how much more a tenderness that hollows out the marrow of the spine as if to fashion it into a flute! Thus Ulrich, touched, would have almost put his arms around Agathe when he heard her wordless lament, and was as enchanted as a lover on the morning after the first tempests. His hand was already touching her shoulder, which was still bare, and at this touch she started, smiling; but in her eyes there reappeared immediately the signs of involuntary dissuasion. Strange images now arose in his mind: Agathe behind bars. Or fearfully waving her hand to him from a growing distance, torn away by the separative force of unknown men holding her in their grip. Then again he himself was not just the one impotently left behind, but also the one enacting the separation. Perhaps these were perennial images of the doubts of love, merely used up in the average life; then again, perhaps not. He would have liked to talk with her about it, but Agathe was now looking away from him to the open window and hesitantly stood up. The fever of love was in their bodies, but their bodies did not dare a repetition, and beyond the window, whose curtains were almost fully open, was what had seduced their imagination, without which the flesh is merely brutal or fainthearted. When Agathe took the first steps in that direction, Ulrich, guessing her intention, turned off the light in order to free their gaze into the night. The moon had come up behind the tops of the spruce trees, whose greenly glimmering black stood out in melancholy contrast to the blue-gold heights and the pallidly glittering distance. Reluctantly, Agathe surveyed that deep little piece of the world.

“So it’s no more than moonlight romance after all?” she asked.

Ulrich looked at her without answering. Her blond hair had turned fiery in the semidarkness against the whitish night, her lips were parted by shadows, her beauty was painful and irresistible. But probably he stood similarly before her gaze, with blue eye sockets in his white face, for she continued: “Do you know what you look like now? ‘Pierrot Lunaire.’ This calls for prudence.” She wanted to injure him a little in her excitement, which was almost making her weep. After all, it was behind the pale mask of Pierrot in his lunar loneliness that, ages ago, all useless young people appeared to themselves as creatures of dolorous whimsy, powdered-chalk white except for blood-drop red lips, and abandoned by a Columbine whom they had never possessed; this certainly did make the love for moonlit nights look rather ridiculous. But Ulrich, to his sister’s initially growing sorrow, readily agreed. “That’s true of ‘Laugh, clown, laugh!’ as well,” he bitterly affirmed. “That song has sent shudders of inmost assent down the backs of a thousand philistines.” But then he added softly, almost whispering: “This whole sphere of emotion is questionable! And yet I would give all the memories of my life for the way you look right now!” Agathe’s hand had found Ulrich’s. Ulrich continued softly and passionately: “What our age understands by an exalted state of feeling is a surfeit of emotion, and moonlight raptures have been debased to orgies of sentimentality. Our time does not even suspect that this elation must be either an incomprehensible mental disturbance or the fragment of another life!”