I was sure I should never learn which winding street was which. As I got tireder and colder, Jode became more boisterous. It was already dark, the Southern City’s early evening, when we had at last only a few deliveries left. I had been walking all day in strange surroundings and wanted only to get back to the evening meal, whereas as his load lightened Jode became more playful. He stooped and gathered up snow and made balls of it and threw it at me and the passers-by. Some of it trickled down my neck, turned to water, ran down my spine and chilled me and made my shirt soggy. I begged him to stop but this pleased him and he kept on, perhaps wanting to see how ridiculous I could look when I got angry about something. The winding streets continued. I felt lost. I could place no dependence on Jode; if he took it into his head to desert me and let me find my own way back, he would. I thought how different he would have treated me if I had been a girl. He would have thought me attractive and special in my azure dress and trousers, with my face clean and my hair long and well brushed. I could have found him attractive. He has high cheekbones and was beginning to look unshaven. I like young men with long unshaven chins. The lights appeared in the windows and on the snow. Lights in windows always make me feel shut-out.

One could no longer see the mountain-sides which lower over this City in the clift.

“Night comes early in this City because of all the dirt in the atmosphere,” Jode explained, reverting to guide language. “The darkness is attracted to it and sticks on to it.”

“You oughtn’t to be proud of that.”

“You shut up, youngster, we City folk are proud of what we want to be proud of.”

On the street corner was a girl tending a cauldron full of bubbles and smell. It was a high cauldron, its rim too high for any of all the dogs around to benefit. In this City, as in no other I’ve ever seen or heard of, dogs are allowed to roam about the streets and they make an awful mess everywhere.

‘That looks savoury, sweetling,” Jode remarked.

The girl looked up, pausing in her stirring with the great wooden spoon. “It is, but it has to be paid for,” she said.

“Is that so?” said Jode, making a swipe at the spoon which he grabbed from the cauldron and licked empty. The girl ran round him giving little cries of distress, and Jode winked at me over the spoon.

The girl hit at his arm and defensively seized the spoon.

“All right, all right, you can have it,” he said, grinning. “Don’t get so excited. I don’t mind. It’s empty now, anyway.”

“You ought to be ashamed,” she said coquettishly.