For the first time in her married life she experienced something that she had never expected, something that did not fit like a legitimate square into the parquet pattern of their life after the dismal surprises of their honeymoon. Thus, out of a trifle, out of a chance stay in a ridiculous provincial town, something had started to grow, joyful and irreparable. And there was no vacuum cleaner in the world that could instantly restore all the rooms of her brain to their former immaculate condition. The vague quality of her sensations, the difficulty of figuring out logically just why she had liked that awkward, eager, provincial boy with tremulous long fingers and pimples between his eyebrows, all this vexed her so much that she was ready to curse the new green dress laid out on the armchair, the plump posterior of Frieda who was rummaging in the lower drawer of the commode, and her own morose reflection in the mirror. She looked at a jewel in which an anniversary was coldly reflected, and remembered that her thirty-fourth birthday had passed the other day, and with a strange impatience began consulting her mirror to detect the threat of a wrinkle, the hint of a sagging fold.