The window behind him was a big oblong, almost a square, a sash window, and it faced the end wall of their garden. At the other side of the wall lay the courts of the tennis club. Hubert and Rose considered the members of the tennis club to be a gay and fashionable set, and Hubert said they were a worthless crowd. On Saturday nights they could hear dance music from the large new addition to the clubhouse. The members called the new addition the Pavilion. The dance music annoyed Hubert, and although Rose had once loved to dance she never protested when he got up and shut the window so that they could have a little peace and quiet in the house. The entrance to the club was on the main road that ran past the end of the terrace of small houses where the Derdons lived. On one side, the club grounds ended at the long end wall that was common to the twenty-six gardens owned by the Derdons and their neighbors all up and down the terrace. The farther boundaries of the club were marked by groves of trees. If Hubert had gone to stand by the window he would have seen the tops of the trees far away beyond the courts, and beyond the trees, coming toward him, the sky. He didn’t move. He sat and listened. The window was open at the top and he could hear the quarrelsome old woman next door scolding her middle-aged daughter, who was unmarried and lived at home, doing the housework and cooking and easing her occasional rebellious rages with loud crying fits that could be heard in the Derdons’ kitchen and also in the back sitting room. That garden next door was a wilderness of ivy and nettles and neglected cabbage plants. It was a disgraceful household. Hubert hoped the unhappy daughter would not have a crying fit this evening, and he wished both women would be removed to some lunatic asylum and that a single man who was never at home would move in next door. He listened to the old woman’s thin, cruel voice, and he thought he heard her daughter’s hysterical silence. He heard, faintly, voices from the tennis courts, and he heard the Donovans’ big collie crying pitifully as it strained at the chain that held it to the cramped kennel that had been its home from a puppy. The Donovans kept the dog as a protection against burglars. Hubert wished a burglar might climb over the end wall and free the dog, who could then go into the house and kill Tom Donovan and his wife and their three impertinent children, and perhaps have enough to eat for once in its life.