The conversation in which this remark was made took place in the room that served as a library and a study, and while Ulrich sat over several books he had brought along on his trip, his sister was rummaging through her father’s collection of legal and philosophical books, a bequest of which she was now a co-inheritor, and from which she drew inspiration for some of her questions. Since their outing the siblings had rarely left the house. This was how they spent their time. Occasionally they would stroll in the garden, where winter had peeled the leaves from the naked shrubs, exposing the swollen, rain-soaked earth beneath. This sight was painful. The air was pallid, like something that has long lain in water. The garden was not large. The paths soon turned back upon themselves, and as the siblings followed them, they found themselves in a state of mind that drifted in circular eddies like those of a current rising behind a dam. When they returned to the house, the rooms were dark and sheltered, and the windows were like deep shafts through which daylight entered with the delicacy and brittleness of thin ivory. Agathe had now, after Ulrich’s last, spirited words, stepped down from the library ladder on which she had been sitting and laid an arm around his shoulder, without answering. That was an unaccustomed show of tenderness, for apart from the two kisses—the one on the evening of their first encounter and the one a few days ago on leaving the shepherds’ hut—the modest reserve that naturally obtains between brother and sister had not yet relaxed into more than words and small friendly gestures, and even those two moments of intimate contact had been covered over by the unexpectedness of the first occasion and by the exuberant mischief that prompted the second. But this time Ulrich immediately thought of the garter his sister had warmly bestowed on the deceased in place of a quantity of words. And another thought shot through his head: “There is no question that she has a lover; but she doesn’t seem to care about him very much, otherwise she would not be so content to stay here.” She was evidently a woman, and had led a woman’s life quite independently of him and would continue to do so. His shoulder felt the beauty of the arm that was resting upon it by the distribution of its weight alone, and from the side that was turned toward his sister he had a shadowy sense of the nearness of her blond armpit and the outline of her breast. But in order not to just sit there in passive surrender to this quiet embrace, he took hold of the fingers of the hand resting near his neck, thus muffling the intimacy of her touch with his. “You know, it’s a little childish, the way we’re talking,” he said, not without annoyance. “The world is full of resolution and action, and we’re sitting here talking in lazy luxuriance about the sweetness of ‘being good’ and the theoretical pots we could fill with it!”