But to this she did not reply. That’s all right, he said, you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. But to this, too, she did not reply. Presently she began to sway to and fro again. He assumed that she would break into song, as before, but no, this time she swayed to and fro without uttering a word, her disheveled braid reflected around the room in a million glittering bits and pieces. To sway like this while singing was one thing, to sway like this completely silently quite another. Say something, please, the astronomer said, but she would not, not one word, she would not even acknowledge his presence, no, now she would only sway, only silently sway! What, he thought, have I done? He was supposed to tutor her in the mathematical arts, but instead, in asking after the cause of death of her brother, a person who, incidentally, according to the possibly mad and probably manipulative Court Chamberlain, was very much still alive, I’ve somehow caused her to start swaying, I have caused her to start silently swaying, and now I cannot make her stop! Meanwhile through the window the Sun was sinking huge and red behind the black spires of the town. In some far-flung window—he imagined, why not, that it was his widowed mother’s—a lantern was already lit. Within a few minutes the evening star would appear. Before long he would need to procure his new tube from his metallurgists and lens-grinders and make his way to the Imperial Observatory. “I could hardly, however, leave the Princess in such a state, such a strange, silent, swaying state.” For her sake, but also for his. “Outside, in the hall, the perpetual patter of bureaucratic footfalls. At any moment, I thought, a bureaucrat will burst in here, lay eyes upon this scene, and interpret what he sees, first to himself and later to the Court Chamberlain, in the most uncharitable light imaginable.” How, though, to snap her out of it, so to speak? What thoughts, if any, he wondered, were going through her mind? What inward state did this outward state signify? Or perhaps this behavior wasn’t atypical of small children? How, the astronomer actually found himself asking himself, and in asking himself this question he felt that his incipient astronomical career had taken an odd turn, do small children behave, typically? What is a small child, does it think, and if so, what does it think? The absurdity of his predicament was not lost on him, the astronomer said, for he’d been appointed to plumb the mysteries of the heavens, yet it was the mysteries of an eight- or nine-year-old girl’s head that he now found himself plumbing. “The rich, I thought to myself, may hire you under the pretense of having you plumb for them the mysteries of nature, but it is almost always their children’s heads, if not their own, that they wish in the end to be plumbed,” he told Leibniz. The hint of a new intuition: he’d extricated himself from one family only to find himself entangled in another family, an actually even bigger and hence more emotionally convoluted family, when what he wanted was to peer in perfect solitude at the firmament. So it was that rather than pondering questions on the order of, Which force occult or otherwise dictates the motions of the orbs?, he found himself pondering questions on the order of, How do I get this small child to stop doing whatever it is it is doing?