Each time before she props herself on her forearms and turns her bottom to him, he first checks whether the legs will hold, not hers, but those of the collapsible table. Everything about his life at this time is provisional. And could come crashing down at any moment. Himself first of all. Transitions require strength, sometimes more than one needs to arrive in a new life. As he knows. Katharina doesn’t know this yet. Her sense of the new society isn’t anything achieved but a kind of featureless condition. She shares his enthusiasms, but the murk from which they take their being, and the efforts that were necessary for him to assemble himself from the wreckage of his childhood and make a new man of himself, those she doesn’t know, can’t know. Is that just as well for her? Or is it what, objectively speaking, separates them?