The back and forth between Wolf and Caro is delicious! I am a real romantic at heart and I miss that element in all Jewish books. Here you walk that line of undercurrent romanticism, after all they HATE eachother but you get that feeling in of the emotions involved in inadvertent courting and also clearly how intellectual discussion can bring on closeness between people.

Sunday found the weather unbearable, but indoors even more so, and Caro abandoned the house as soon as possible after breakfast. She was, to be fair, yoked with Alexander, but thankfully the heat had a rather dampening effect on his enthusiasm after a few squares, and in consequence it was as pleasant as the circumstances allowed.
“The old house!” Alex proposed, suddenly. “Oh please please please Auntie Caro! Please please please!”
“Oh, we mustn’t,” Caro said, on reflex, but then thought, why ever not? She hadn’t seen the dear old house since the fire, a year and a half past, and was suddenly overcome with the desire to set eyes upon it again.
“Will you use my bonnet as an apple basket again?” she demanded of Alex, sternly, as he began to dance lightly in place (never a good sign).
“Oh, never,” Alex promised, desperately, and so she wantonly believed him and they set off for the burnt section of town. It was not a pleasant stroll; whole streets still lay in charred ruin, and Caro’s soft heart overflowed with pity. Alex, predictably, was enthralled. Even he fell silent, however, as they approached the familiar lines of the street where Caro had grown up, where the shrouds of memories still lingered: and oh! Oh, how terrible it was, the great sagging ruin that had once been their beloved home, the gaping blackened maw where none ought to be. It was awful, it was indecent, and yet Caro could only trace its foreign slump and try to map what no longer existed. The piazza where she and Gusta had played as children still stood, strangely untouched; nearly everything else was gone or warped into strangeness, wrongness. She sat on the foundation of the iron fencing and remembered, suddenly, having stood on that same balcony on the glorious night of Secession, Noah outlined in the blazing stars of fireworks.
The world changes, the Bavarian sighed.
There was something in her throat; old ash, perhaps, or just—the heat, the heat. A mirage, sitting beside her, standing on the porch above.
“I know,” she said. Alex, climbing a fallen beam after ignoring her protestations, did not turn.
Is this ‘regular and natural’? the Bavarian asked. Is this the ‘regular and natural’ to which the laws fail to conform?
“Hush,” she snapped, or tried to, but truly—what was the use? Snapping at a thought, a specter, a shade of her own thoughts? She was living a metaphor, for goodness sake, sitting here in the ruins of the old house, and yet—
She sat, very still, and watched Alex chuck what most likely had been chunks of her bedroom wall into the middle distance.
Not so very much, then, the Bavarian murmured.
“Oh, do be quiet, you are getting tiresome,” she said. This time, Alex turned around at her voice, looking surprised. She waved at him and felt a fool.