At half past five in the morning, after seeing Thea home, Gurdweill dragged himself through the dead streets. Taking small, slow steps he tottered down the middle of the street, his head heavy and at the same time absolutely empty. Fresh morning breezes whipped across his face, suddenly changing direction and buffeting him from the side and the back, trying to rob him of his hat. He took it off with a mechanical movement and abandoned his rumpled hair to the wind. A row of big carts, piled high with vegetables, trundled slowly towards the market; the heavy wheels creaked and scraped on the street, vanquishing the stubborn silence. High up on their perches the drivers slumbered, huddled in sacks against a possible rain shower and the morning chill, withdrawn into themselves like lifeless bundles. It seemed as if they had been driving thus for years on end, driving on and on without a pause. The lamplighters bobbed up in their filthy cloaks, zigzagging from one side of the street to the other, and putting out the gas lights with the long bamboo poles they carried on their shoulders like tremendous spears. From time to time a solitary milk cart emerged from a side street, the big tin containers lined up one on top of the other, or a closed bread van from the Hammer or Anker bakeries. Here and there people were already waiting for the first trams: prostitutes with wilted, tired faces, their unmade-up eyes naked and wrinkled. How depressing they looked in their garish, crumpled dresses, their gay hats awry. Women from the poorest of the poor, one with a bundle of morning papers wrapped up in a bottle-green shawl, one with a huge basket of vegetables. A few workers. The newborn morning invaded the street with a pale, milky light, and everything seemed strange and dreamlike to Gurdweill. The night had left him with a feeling of measureless oppression, strangely combined with a kind of reckless hilarity. He was already on the quay, and suddenly he stopped dead and laughed to himself with a lopsided grin on his face. Anyone who saw him would surely have thought him drunk. He set off again, crossed Ferdinand’s Bridge, and stopped to wait for a tram. With lustreless eyes he looked at the two prostitutes waiting there, and the picture of the hotel room in which he had spent the night rose up before him. The memory gave him such a disagreeable feeling that he was forced to avert his eyes. But at the same time he was filled with a great longing for Thea. For a moment he imagined that he would never see her again, that he had parted from her forever, and he felt utterly abandoned, fatally ill, and completely useless. At that moment he could have burst out crying. Gurdweill now knew, without the shadow of a doubt, that he was enslaved to her, to this strapping blonde girl, forever, and that without her he was a broken vessel, fit for nothing. He moved away from the tram stop and walked down Praterstrasse on shaky legs.