Ulrich immediately agrees, which saddens Agathe, but they both know she is right. The necessary prudence of rational checks on mystical intuition is a constant refrain in the exchanges between the siblings, not as a defense against drifting into kitsch—that would be merely a lapse in taste—but against deceiving themselves, or worse, each other, about something that matters to them more than life itself.

•

Ulrich contemplates Agathe’s face, hoping to find it similar to his own. He sees no clear resemblance. And then: “There was something about this face that unsettled him. After a while he realized what it was: he couldn’t make out its expression. It lacked whatever it is that allows one to draw the usual conclusions about a person. It was not an empty face by any means, but nothing in it was emphasized or summed up as a readable character trait.”

A little later, as they smoke their last cigarettes before retiring for the night, he muses again about her appearance:

He didn’t know what to make of his sister. There was nothing either emancipated or bohemian about her, even though she was sitting there in the wide trousers in which she had received her unknown brother. It was more something hermaphroditic, it seemed to him now; as she gestured and moved in conversation, the light, masculine garment, which was semitransparent, like water, suggested the delicate form underneath, and in contrast to the independent freedom of her legs, her lovely hair was gathered up in decidedly feminine style. But the center of this amphibious impression was still her face, which possessed the charm of a woman to a high degree and yet had something missing or held in reserve whose nature he could not make out.

Ulrich never comments on the fundamental trait they have in common, but the reader is prompted to recognize it: Agathe is a woman without qualities and is thus Ulrich’s counterpart in female form.

Not having known each other since they were children and now meeting as adults at a moment in their lives when they are at parallel points of isolation and estrangement from the worlds they have each inhabited, they are delighted to find in each other not just a sibling but a kindred soul. What is this kinship, what is its nature? The question is charged with ambiguous appeal. They are a man and a woman, after all. Moreover, they are young, attractive, highly intelligent, and not bound by any ties, aside from Agathe’s marriage to an unloved husband, that might stand in the way of an intimate relationship. But they are brother and sister.

Agathe seems no more constrained by the incest taboo than she is by any other prohibition. In her education in a convent school, she has known moral authority only as rules laid down for the suppression of pleasure. And if she has lived a life of submission to her wifely duties, it was not out of conviction but in self-humbling penitence for her failure to keep her first husband, and with him her first and only true love, alive when he was dying of typhus. Ulrich, on the other hand, Nietzschean iconoclast though he is, and obsessed with discovering, together with his sister, the sunken continent of an ecstatic, primordial morality, is surprisingly wary of trespassing the moral and legal codes of his day.