A quick, blurred scene flashed before his eyes: he, Gurdweill, towered wrathfully above them while they cringed and kneeled and begged his pardon. And this curious scene made him crush the editor’s letter, which he was holding in his hand. The rustle of the paper returned him to reality. ‘What nonsense!’ he said to himself with a gratified smile. He went up to the table and proceeded to straighten out the crumpled letter, meticulously flattening it with the edge of his hand as if it were a matter of the utmost importance. After that he glanced at his watch: it was twenty to six. He went over to the window and drew the grubby net curtains aside. A fine drizzle was falling imperceptibly from the sky, wetting the street so that it glistened blackly. There was a half-open window on the second floor of the building across the street, the Hotel Zum Nordbahnhof. In the depths of the room Gurdweill saw the profile of a naked woman, presumably standing in front of a mirror. The woman was powdering her naked body with a big puff, while a man in his shirtsleeves circled her, a lighted cigarette in his mouth. Every now and then he stood still, removed the cigarette from his mouth, and kissed her on the nape of her neck and her back, and then resumed his circling and smoking. After a while the woman disappeared into a part of the room out of Gurdweill’s field of vision. ‘What a swindle!’ The thought flashed through his mind. Nevertheless, he went on standing there and looking out, waiting with a pounding heart. A few minutes later the woman appeared again, already half dressed. Gurdweill turned away from the window and sat down on the sofa. There was a hot, tingling feeling in his limbs. Scenes of intimacy between him and Thea rose up in his imagination, among which for some reason loomed the memory of a cheap, old-fashioned picture depicting a man sitting bowed over a table, as if sunk in thought — a picture that must have penetrated his unconscious mind from the walls of one of the hotel rooms he had visited with Thea, although he could not now remember where. He saw this picture with great clarity, as if it were hanging on the wall before him, and he did not like it in the least. On the contrary, it seemed to him excessively ugly, even repulsive, but it persisted in intruding on his thoughts with a pointless obstinacy that resisted all his attempts to banish it. In the end he lit a cigarette and went over to the window again. In the hotel window opposite, there was no longer anything to be seen. ‘They must have gone out by now,’ he concluded to himself. He went on standing there for a while and then decided to shave. He was still properly shaved from the morning, but nevertheless, he reflected, he should shave again in honour of his last day of freedom, and also because he had to get up early to go to work the next day and he wouldn’t have time to shave.