Gurdweill entered his room and lit the sooty oil lamp. The room seemed very empty in the silence of the night. He walked around for a while and then started to make up his bed on the couch. It never occurred to him to sleep on the bed, even though it was certainly cleaner. He was, to some extent, a creature of habit and, since he had grown accustomed to sleeping on the couch, he could see no reason to change his bed. For a few days it wasn’t worth the trouble. And besides, the couch had grown accustomed to him, too, adapting itself like a mould to the curves of his body, so that whenever drowsiness overcame him far from home, it was this old couch that he saw beckoning to him in his imagination. But in the heat of the summer he felt a secret resentment towards it too, as if it were an unfaithful lover conspiring against him with the hated bedbugs.