The room was warm, and steeped in a tender, vaguely sad tranquillity, like the mood pervading a room in which a beautiful young woman has just given birth. There was no sound from the street but for a dim, distant, insubstantial murmur, audible only to the sharpest senses. Outside, a grey, rain-spotted day was drawing in, with a blustering wind stirring the air and turning everything upside down. Inside the room, the dusk had already gathered, and an invisible worm began gnawing, for no particular reason, at his heart.

The outlines of Lotte’s face were barely distinguishable. She lay without moving, as if sunk in gloomy thoughts. After a short silence she suddenly asked, raising her head slightly to look at him: ‘What are you going to do now?’

Gurdweill looked at her for a moment uncomprehendingly. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, are you going to remain in Vienna, in your old room?’

‘I don’t understand. I never intended to leave the city, or to change my room.’

He looked at her enquiringly, wondering whether she was feverish. But Lotte pulled her blanket up as if she felt cold. She fell silent again. Her silence began to weigh on Gurdweill. In the mirror on the cupboard opposite him, his own reflection — black, frozen, his hair on end — stared back at him and, for some reason, stirred his heart. From the next room the faint, barely perceptible ticking of a clock dripped into the silence. Life shrank to a single point, which flew invisibly around the room, impossible to locate.

Lotte asked him to turn on the light. He would find the switch next to the door. When he returned to his chair, she lit a cigarette and sat up on the sofa, dangling her slipper-shod feet. She had an expression of firm resolution on her face, which was, at the same time, profoundly sad. Gurdweill looked at her intently and discovered, as if for the first time, that she was extraordinarily beautiful, a beauty not of this world.

With a vigorous gesture she passed her hand over her brow and her cropped auburn curls, as if to remove some final barrier, and in a soft but determined voice she began to speak.