Towards evening of a clear and calm afternoon in May there was a haze over the black sites of the city; the naked walls looked reddish yellow and the factory chimneys a livery brown in the sunlight. Large and small houses, high and low roofs, stood outlined against the greyish-purple air, heavy with dust and smoke and vapours. A little tree by a red wall showed tiny greenish-yellow leaves, transparent in the sunlight.
The mould on the board walls of the workshops was bright green and the soot flakes on the factory walls jet black in some places and in others covered, as it were, with a thin, glistening silvery film.
Jenny had been walking about all the morning in the outskirts of the town, where the sky rose dark blue and hot over the olive-golden fir-tops and the amber-coloured buds of the leaf trees, but here in the city over the high houses and the net of telephone wires it was growing pale behind a thin veil of opal-white haze. This was really the prettier sight of the two, though Gert could not see it. To him the city was always ugly, grey, and dirty; it was the city they had cursed, all those young men of the eighties who had been obliged to settle down there to work. He was probably standing at his window this moment, looking out in the sun, and to him the play of light in line and colour was not worth noticing; it was merely a sunray outside his prison window.
She stopped a few steps from his door, looking up and down the street, as usual. There was nobody she knew, only business people on their way home. It was past six o'clock.
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