Sunday was very hot. It was the kind of day which normally would have made her acutely depressed. The air was windless and sultry, the streets dusty and paper-littered, the sky blazingly and mercilessly blue. As Catherine walked briskly down Gifford Road she passed the whelk-seller pushing his briny-flavoured handcart along the gutter. Further down the road the Sabbath carnival of the suburbs had already begun: a downstairs window was wide open at the bottom, and from within came the throaty gargling strains of a gramophone. At another house a piano was vamping to an antiquated music-hall ditty. The tar in the roadway was sweating in great oozing blots, and the wheels of the whelk cart had left conspicuous ruts in the soft tar-macadam near the kerb. In the High Road (running north and south) there was no shade save from occasional trees that overhung the sidewalks. Trams and motor-buses fluttered by bearing crowds of white-frocked girls and men in sedate browns and greys Forestwards. Now and then a wagonette rumbled over the wooden blocks of the roadway, tastelessly beflagged and beribboned, crammed to overflowing with miscellaneous juvenility, all shouting and singing and waving paper streamers. Sometimes a middle-aged or elderly group passed in similar vehicles, and the noise and clamour of these was of the maudlin type. As each party drew up to the King’s Arms there was a frenzy of horn-blowing and a quick descent for refreshment. Catherine passed along the hot pavements with light step and light heart. She passed through the crowded, gesticulating throng outside the King’s Arms, where the marble ledges were crowded with empty, froth-smeared beer glasses, and the diminutive shrubs in green-painted barrels were yellow and parched for lack of water. Normally these things would have struck her as tawdry and dismal, but to-day she took no notice of them. She was not even conscious of the terribly melancholy aspect of whole rows of shuttered shops with doors blistering in the heat.