When you seem finally to have made up your mind to spend the evening at home, when you have put on your smoking-jacket and settled down after supper with a light on the table to the piece of work or the game that usually occupies you till bedtime, when the weather outside is so unpleasant that it makes staying at home the obvious thing to do, when by now you have been sitting quiet at the table for so long that to go out would cause general astonishment,when the staircase is anyhow dark now and the front door locked, and when despite all this you get to your feet in a sudden fit of restlessness, change your jacket, promptly reappear dressed for the street, explain that you have to go out and after a brief word of goodbye actually do so, estimating the degree of irritation you may have left behind from the force with which you slam the flat door, when you then rediscover yourself down in the street, your limbs responding with particular agility to the unexpected freedom you have procured for them, when you feel all your decisiveness concentrated within you as a result of this one decisive act, when it strikes you with more than usual significance that your power to effect the swiftest of changes with ease and to cope with it outstrips your need to do so, and when in such mood you go striding down the long streets, then for the space of that evening you have completely broken out of the ranks of your family, which veers off into the void, while you yourself, firm as can be, black with your sharpness of outline, slapping the back of your thighs, rise up to your true stature.

All this is intensified still further if at so late an hour of the evening you look up a friend to see how he is.