It was a Tuesday. Warmer than the preceding days, which had been unseasonably cold. Gurdweill had wandered about the city for a long time, and was now sitting in his room, next to the stove, from whose open door a tongue of light burst forth, quivering on the floor between the couch and the bed, and casting a pale reflection on the bottom of the opposite wall. It was evening, almost six o’clock. Gurdweill did not light the lamp, since he liked being in the dark. ‘In the light’ — the idea crossed his mind — ‘a man sees what is outside him, and in the dark he sees himself. And the inside of things too …’ He suddenly felt like a primeval man in a dark forest, sitting by a fire he had built to frighten away the wild animals. He imagined hearing a stealthy rustle in the surrounding bushes, and through thousands of generations the animal terror of unknown forces holding sway all around him was transmitted to his soul. He made an automatic defensive gesture in the dark, and found himself back in the reality of the present. At that moment a motorcar blew two sharp hoots on its horn. Gurdweill waited in suspense for the third hoot, which did not come. ‘In spite of everything’ — he returned to his previous line of thought — ‘we’re better off today than primitive man. A house like this with a stove and a bed waiting for you …’ He remembered several nights a number of years before, when he had been obliged to wander the streets of this very Vienna for lack of lodgings or money, some of them when the autumn was quite well advanced, like now — and his warm room seemed doubly cosy and secure. That, at least, was impossible now! And pity welled up in him for those unfortunates, in Vienna as in the other great cities of the world, who were still outside, forced to spend their nights on a bench under the open sky, or under a bridge, or in the sewers. Society should see to it that every human being had somewhere to live and a bit of bread to eat — that at least!