All over the city, ruddy, tanned faces were conspicuous in the crowds: the faces of those who had recently, or only yesterday, returned from the country, the beaches, and the mountains — or those who had spent all summer in town but taken advantage of the many swimming pools of the city and its environs to bathe and roast themselves in the sun. The season of theatres, opera, and cinema shows began; the cafés filled up; and the offices and factories started working at full capacity.

In the parched, rainless summer, those forced to remain in the city had breathed not air but a kind of molten orange metal, full of the suffocating stench of petrol fumes mingled with melting asphalt. And they had complained bitterly of their lot. But now that the summer was dying, there was an ache in their hearts — precisely the hearts of those who had suffered from it the most.

It was eleven o’clock on Sunday morning. Gurdweill had risen early to put in a few hours’ work while his wife slept, and now he was sprawled, fully dressed, on the couch that served as his bed at night, and upon which the pillows and blankets were still piled. Thea had woken up a few moments before in a good mood, jumped out of bed, and snatched him from the table, sweeping him up from his chair as if he were a one-year-old and swinging him to and fro in her arms, she in her long nightgown and he in his clothes and shoes, bouncing him in her arms like a baby and dancing round the room, shouting and laughing wildly. ‘My little bunny rabbit! You’re a cute little thing after all! You’re the child of my old age, that’s what you are!’ As always when she picked him up in her arms, Gurdweill was unwilling. He felt a peculiar pleasure, mixed with a vague kind of shame, shame before himself, before Thea, and before the whole world, as if the most private part of his being had been exposed in public — and he was unwilling. But he could not protest. He only repeated from time to time, pleading and demanding at once, with a weak, twisted smile, ‘Stop it, Thea! Please let me go.’ But Thea did not put him down until he became too heavy for her. Then she exclaimed, panting for breath, ‘Well, rabbit, I couldn’t carry you round like that all day long!’