“When one turns over in bed,” Ulrich gruffly declared.

“What does that mean?”

“Excuse the mundane example,” he said, “but it’s true: You’re uncomfortable; you keep thinking of changing your position; you form one resolution after the other; and suddenly you’ve turned over! It’s really more accurate to say you’ve been turned over. Whether you act on the spur of passion or after long reflection, it’s always the same pattern.” He did not look at her as he said this; he was answering himself. He still felt: “Here I stood and wanted something that was never satisfied.”

Agathe smiled again, but the smile that passed over her lips resembled a movement of pain. She returned to where she had stood earlier and stared silently into the unknowable distance. Her fur coat formed a dark silhouette against the sky, and her slender figure formed a striking contrast to the wide stillness of the landscape and the cloud shadows flitting across it. Watching her, Ulrich had an indescribably intense feeling of being in the presence of an event. He was almost ashamed to be standing there in the company of a woman instead of next to a saddled horse. And although he was well aware that the cause of this lay in the tranquil pictorial effect emanating from his sister at that moment, he had the impression that something was happening, not in himself but somewhere in the world, and that he was missing it. He told himself he was being ridiculous. And yet there had been something accurate in his thoughtlessly uttered assertion that he regretted his whole life. Sometimes he longed to be embroiled in events as in a wrestling match, even if they were senseless or criminal, as long as they were decisive. Definitive, not vitiated by the constant provisional quality that events have when people remain superior to their experience. “In other words, ending in themselves, and valid for no other reason,” Ulrich reflected, now searching intently for another way to say it, and inadvertently this train of thought no longer wandered off to imagined events but settled on the sight that Agathe herself, mirroring nothing but herself, offered at these moments. Thus brother and sister stood for quite a while, apart and solitary, in a hesitance filled with contradictions that did not permit either of them to introduce a change. But perhaps the strangest thing was that on this occasion nothing was further from Ulrich’s thoughts than that something had already happened, since, on Agathe’s behalf and out of a wish to get rid of his unsuspecting brother-in-law, he had palmed off on him the lie that there was a sealed will that was only to be opened after several days, and assured him, equally against his better knowledge, that Agathe would look after his interests, actions Hagauer would later characterize as “aiding and abetting.”