The Sudden Walk

When it looks as if you had made up your mind finally
to stay at home for the evening, when you have put on
your house jacket and sat down after supper with a light on
the table to the piece of work or the game that usually
precedes your going to bed, when the weather outside
is unpleasant so that staying indoors seems natural, and
when you have already been sitting quietly at the table for
so long that your departure must occasion surprise to
everyone, when, besides, the stairs are in darkness and
the front door locked, and in spite of all that you have
started up in a sudden fit of restlessness, changed your
jacket, abruptly dressed yourself for the street, explained
that you must go out and with a few curt words of
leave-taking actually gone out, banging the flat door
more or less hastily according to the degree of displeasure
you think you have left behind you, and when you find
yourself once more in the street with limbs swinging extra
freely in answer to the unexpected liberty you have procured
for them, when as a result of this decisive action you feel
concentrated within yourself all the potentialities of decisive
action, when you recognize with more than usual significance
that your strength is greater than your need to accomplish
effortlessly the swiftest of changes and to cope with it, when
in this frame of mind you go striding down the long
streets - then for that evening you have completely got away
from your family, which fades into insubstantiality, while you
yourself, a firm, boldly drawn black figure, slapping yourself
on the thigh, grow to your true stature.

All this is still heightened if at such a late hour in the evening
you look up a friend to see how she is getting on.