At such times he was always cheerful and ready for anything. “Come along, little dark thing, come along!” he had shouted across the street, and something like a race took place between Petra and a mustachioed policeman. But a taxi, a frightful contraption, had carried her off to an evening quite pleasant but really not very different from any other evening.

The morning had come, the gray, desolate morning in the room of an accommodation hotel, which always had such a depressing effect. The sort of occasion when you ask yourself: “What’s the use of it all? Why do I go on living?” As was proper, she had feigned sleep while the gentleman hurriedly dressed, quietly, so as not to wake her. For conversations on the morning after were unpopular and distressing, because you discovered that you had nothing to say to the other person and, more often than not, loathed him. All she had to do was to look through her eyelashes to see whether he put the money for her on the bedside table. Well, he had put the money down. Everything was going as usual, not a word of another meeting, and he was already at the door.

She did not know how it happened or what had come over her, but she sat up in bed and asked in a low and faltering voice: “Would you—would you, sir—oh, may I come with you?”

At first he had not understood and had turned round quite startled. “Excuse me?”

Then he had thought that she, perhaps new to such a situation, was ashamed to pass the proprietress and the porter. He had declared that he was willing to wait for her if she made haste. But while she hurriedly dressed, it appeared that it was not a question so simple as that of leaving, unmolested, the house for the street. She was used to that. (She had made no pretenses from the first moment.) No, she wanted to stay with him altogether. Wouldn’t it be possible? “Oh, please, please!”

Who knows what he was thinking? He was no longer in a hurry, though. He stood there in the gloomy room—it was just that horrible hour, shortly before five in the morning, which gentlemen always choose for leaving, for then they can catch the first streetcar to their lodgings and freshen themselves up before their work; and many pretend to, or actually do, have a nap, so as to leave the bed disturbed.

He drummed with his fingers thoughtfully on the table. With greenish eyes shining out from beneath his lowered brow, he looked contemplatively at her. Did she think he had any money?

No. She hadn’t thought of that. It would be all the same to her.

He was a second lieutenant in the war, and without a pension. Without a job. Without a fixed income. In fact, without any income.

It was all right. That wasn’t her reason for asking.

He did not inquire why she had asked. Indeed, he did not ask any more questions, anything at all. Only later did it strike her that he might have asked a lot of questions, very disagreeable questions. For instance, whether she made a habit of begging men to let her go with them; whether she was expecting a baby; thousands of disgusting things. But he stood there and looked at her. Already she was convinced that he would say “yes.” Ought to. Something very mysterious had urged her to ask him. She had never thought of such a thing before, nor was she at that time the least in love with him.