“I could suddenly become a completely different person: You admitted that yourself!” Agathe interrupted him.

Glancing aside at this moment, Ulrich was reminded that they were not alone: two people were listening to their conversation. The old woman—she might have been no more than forty but her rags and the traces of her humble life made her look older—had sat down by the stove with a friendly look on her face, and sitting beside her was the shepherd, who had come home unbeknownst to his guests, who were too preoccupied with themselves to have noticed his arrival. The two old people rested their hands on their knees and listened, flattered, it seemed, and astonished by such a conversation, even if they did not understand a single word of it. They saw that the milk had not been drunk and the sausage had not been eaten; it was a spectacle, and who knows, maybe an uplifting one. They did not even whisper with each other. Ulrich’s gaze dove into their opened eyes, and out of embarrassment he gave them a smile, which only the woman reciprocated, while her husband gravely maintained respectful decorum.

“We must eat!” Ulrich said in English to his sister. “They’re wondering about us.”

Obediently she toyed with some bread and meat, while he resolutely ate and even drank of the milk. Agathe meanwhile said, aloud and unembarrassed: “When I really think about it, I find the idea of seriously hurting him unpleasant. So maybe I don’t want to kill him. But I do want to extinguish him! Rip him into little pieces, pulverize them in a mortar, pour the dust into the water: this I would like to do! Completely destroy everything that has happened!”

“You know, it’s a little funny, the way we’re talking,” Ulrich said.

Agathe was silent for a while. But then she said: “Remember, you promised me on the first day that you would support me against Hagauer.”

“Of course I will. But not that way.”

Again Agathe was silent. Then she suddenly said: “If you bought or rented a car, we could drive to my house via Iglau and come back by the longer route, I think via Tabor. It wouldn’t occur to anyone that we were there in the night.”

“And the servants? Fortunately I can’t drive!” Ulrich laughed, but then he shook his head, annoyed: “Some newfangled notions you’ve got!”

“You can say that,” Agathe said. Pensively she pushed a piece of bacon back and forth with her fingernail, and it looked as if the fingernail, which had acquired a greasy sheen from the bacon, were doing it all by itself. “But you also said: The virtues of society are vices for the saint!”

“Except I didn’t say the vices of society are virtues for the saint!” Ulrich corrected her. He laughed, seized Agathe’s hand, and cleaned it with his handkerchief.

“The fact is, you always take everything back!” Agathe scolded, smiling ruefully, while the blood rose to her face as she tried to free her finger.