One morning Reiter and Ingeborg made love. The girl was feverish and her legs, under her nightdress, seemed to Reiter the most beautiful legs he had seen in his life. Ingeborg had just turned twenty and Reiter was twenty-six. From then on they began to fuck every day. Reiter liked to do it sitting by the window with Ingeborg straddling him, making love as they looked into each other's eyes or out at the ruins of Cologne. Ingeborg liked to do it in bed, where she cried and writhed and came six or seven times, with her legs on Reiter's bony shoulders, calling him my darling, my love, my prince, my sweetheart, words that embarrassed Reiter, because he found them precious and in those days he had declared war on preciousness and sentimentality and softness and anything overembellished or contrived or saccharine, but he didn't object, since the despair he glimpsed in Ingeborg's eyes, never entirely dispelled even by pleasure, paralyzed him as if he, Reiter, were a mouse caught in a trap.