The faces of the two old people by the stove, who were still watching as before, now lit up with wide, beaming smiles.

“When you talk to me like that, first one way, then the other,” Agathe said forcefully with a low voice, “it’s like seeing myself in the shards of a mirror. With you it’s impossible to see all of oneself in one view!”

“No,” Ulrich replied, still holding on to her hand, “these days no one sees all of himself, nor does anyone move as a unified whole: that is the problem!”

Agathe gave in and suddenly stopped trying to withdraw her arm. “I’m certainly the opposite of holy,” she said softly. “I may have been worse in my indifference than a woman for hire. And I’m certainly not enterprising and probably won’t be able to kill anyone. But when you said what you said about the saint the first time, quite a while ago, there was something I saw as a whole . . . !” She lowered her head to think or to prevent him from seeing her face. “I saw a saint, he may have been standing on a fountain. To tell the truth, I may have seen nothing at all, but I felt something that would have to be described that way. The water was flowing, and what the saint was doing also flowed over the rim, as if he were the bowl of a fountain brimming over on all sides. That, I think, is how one ought to be, then you would always be doing the right thing, and it wouldn’t matter what you did.”

“Agathe sees herself standing in the world as a fount of holy profusion, trembling on account of her sins and much astonished to see snakes and rhinoceroses, mountains and chasms lying at her feet, serene and even smaller than she is. But what about Hagauer?” Ulrich said, gently teasing her.

“That’s just it. He can’t be part of it. He has to go!”

“I’ll tell you a story too,” her brother said. “Every time I’ve had to take part in some common venture, some genuine human occasion, I’ve been like a man who steps out of the theater before the last act for a breath of air, sees the great dark emptiness with the many stars, and leaves hat, coat, and show behind him in order to walk away.”

Agathe gave him a searching look. It was and it wasn’t a fitting answer.

Ulrich met her gaze. “You too are often plagued by an aversion for which the corresponding attraction does not yet exist,” he said, and thought: “Is she really like me?” Again it seemed to him: Maybe she is, in the way a pastel resembles a woodcut. He considered himself the more solid of the two. And she was more beautiful. So pleasing in her beauty. He now released her finger to grasp her whole hand; it was a warm, long hand full of life, which up till now he had held only for greeting. His young sister was agitated, and though there were no actual tears in her eyes, there was a shimmer in them. “In a few days you will leave me too,” she said, “and how am I going to cope with everything then?”