Agathe freed her fingers but let her hand return to its place. “What’s this book you’ve been reading all these days?” she asked.

“You know what it is,” he replied. “You’ve peeked into it over my shoulder often enough.”

“But I can’t make heads or tails of it.”

He could not decide whether he should talk about it. Agathe, who had now pulled up a chair, was crouching behind him and was simply and peacefully resting her face in his hair, as if sleeping in it. Ulrich was strangely reminded of the moment when his enemy Arnheim had wrapped an arm around him and the unregulated current of physical contact with another being had poured into him as if through a breach. But this time his own nature did not rise to repel the intruder; instead something was flowing toward it that had been buried beneath the rubble of mistrust and resentment that fills the heart of any man who has lived a fairly long time. Agathe’s relationship to him, hovering between sister and woman, stranger and friend, yet not identifiable as any of them, also did not—as he had already quite often concluded—reside in a particularly far-reaching agreement of thought and feeling; and yet, as he noticed at this moment almost with amazement, this highly ambiguous relationship had become indistinguishable from the fact that in the course of relatively few days, in consequence of myriad impressions impossible to review in a moment, Agathe’s mouth now rested on his hair without further claim, and that the hair had become warm and moist from her breath. This was something as spiritual as it was physical. For when Agathe repeated her question, Ulrich was overcome by a seriousness such as he had not felt since the days when he was still young and a believer; and by the time this cloud of weightless gravity had vanished—a field extending from the space behind his back through his whole body to the book on which his thoughts were resting—he had given an answer that surprised him more by the complete absence of irony in its tone than by its content. He said: “I’m instructing myself about the ways of the holy life.”

He had stood up and walked a few steps, not to move away from his sister but in order to see her from there. “You needn’t laugh,” he said. “I’m not religious; I’m looking at the road to holiness and wondering if it’s possible to drive a car on it!”

“I only laughed,” Agathe replied, “because I’m so curious to hear what you’re going to say. The books you brought along are new to me, but I have a feeling they’re not completely beyond my understanding.”

“Does this sound familiar?” her brother asked, already convinced that she would not find it strange: “You can be caught up in the most vehement emotion but suddenly your glance falls on the play of some random thing abandoned by God and the world and you can’t tear yourself away from it?! Suddenly you feel yourself wafted aloft by its tiny existence like a feather sailing in the wind, relieved of all weight and all power?!”