That was how she had been found by her brother, who registered her illuminated headquarters with one glance; for he too knew this drawing room and could even tell her that the original owner of the house was supposed to have been a rich merchant who later ran into trouble, which enabled their great-grandfather, who was an imperial notary, to acquire the attractive property at a price well within his means. There were all sorts of other things Ulrich knew about this salon, which he had examined thoroughly, and his sister was especially struck by the explanation that in their great-grandparents’ time this rigid decor was felt to be particularly natural; she did not find it easy to understand this, because to her the room’s furnishings looked like something spawned in a geometry class, and it took a while before she could feel her way into the sensibility of an age that was so satiated with the overbearing forms of the baroque that its own somewhat stiff affectation of symmetrical balance was veiled by the tender illusion of being in accord with a nature conceived to be pure, rational, and unadorned. But when finally, with the help of all the details Ulrich supplied, she had envisioned this shift of ideas, she found it nice to know so much about things that her experience of life up to then had led her to despise; and when her brother wanted to know what she was reading, she quickly covered her hoard of books with her body, even though she boldly insisted that she enjoyed reading bad books just as much as good ones.

Ulrich had worked in the morning and had then left the house. His hope for a period of concentrated study had not been fulfilled so far, and the helpful effect that might have been expected from the interruption of his customary life had been outweighed by the distractions that his new circumstances brought in their wake. Only after the funeral did a change occur, when relations with the outer world, which had started up in such a lively fashion, had been cut off as if at a stroke. For it was only as a kind of representation of their father that the siblings had been the center of sympathetic attention for a few days and come to feel the numerous kinds of connections attendant upon their position, and apart from Walter’s old father they knew no one in the town whom they would have wanted to visit;^* nor had anyone invited them, in consideration for their mourning; and only Professor Schwung had shown up, not only at the funeral but also the following day, to inquire whether his dead friend had not left a manuscript on the problem of diminished responsibility, which one might hope to see published posthumously. This abrupt transition from ceaseless bubbling activity to leaden stillness produced an almost physical shock. Besides, they were sleeping in the rooms they had occupied as children, as there were no guest rooms in the house, upstairs in the attic on makeshift cots surrounded by the meager trappings of childhood, which have something of the simplicity of a padded cell, crowding the mind with the honorless luster of oilcloth on the tables or the linoleum wasteland on the floor into which the stone block construction kit once spewed its fixed ideas of architecture, and insinuating themselves even into one’s dreams. These memories, which were as senseless and limitless as the life for which they were supposed to have been a preparation, made it seem pleasant to the siblings that at least their bedrooms were adjacent, separated only by a closet used for clothes and storage; and because the bathroom was on the floor below, they were dependent on each other after waking as well, encountering each other in the emptiness of the stairs and of the house as soon as they got up in the morning, forced to take each other’s wishes into account, and having to tackle jointly the many problems posed by the unfamiliar household with which they had suddenly been entrusted. Naturally this alliance, as intimate as it was unforeseen, had an element of humor that did not escape them; it resembled the adventurous comedy of a shipwreck that had swept them back to the solitary island of their childhood; and both these circumstances led them after the first few days, over which they had no control, to strive for independence, but each of them did so more out of consideration for the other than for them­self.