In the bar, which was a large room with a vacant space in the middle, there were several peasants sitting by the wall on the tops of some casks, but they looked different from those in K. ’s inn. They were more neatly and uniformly dressed in coarse yellowish-grey cloth, with loose jackets and tightly-fitting trousers. They were smallish men with at first sight a strong mutual resemblance, having flat bony faces, but rounded cheeks. They were all quiet, and sat with hardly a movement, except that they followed the newcomers with their eyes, but they did even that slowly and indifferently. Yet because of their numbers and their quietness they had a certain effect on K. He took Olga’s arm again as if to explain his presence there. A man rose up from one corner, an acquaintance of Olga’s, and made towards her, but K. wheeled her round by the arm in another direction. His action was perceptible to nobody but Olga, and she tolerated it with a smiling side-glance.
The beer was drawn off by a young girl called Frieda. An unobtrusive little girl with fair hair, sad eyes and hollow cheeks, but with a striking look of conscious superiority. As soon as her eye met K. ’s it seemed to him that her look decided something concerning himself, something which he had not known to exist, but which her look assured him did exist. He kept on studying her from the side, even while she was speaking to Olga. Olga and Frieda were apparently not intimate, they exchanged only a few cold words. K. wanted to hear more, and so interposed with a question on his own account: “Do you know Herr Klamm?” Olga laughed out loud. “What are you laughing at?” asked K. irritably. “I’m not laughing,” she protested, but went on laughing. “Olga is a childish creature,” said K. bending far over the counter in order to attract Frieda’s gaze again. But she kept her eyes lowered and laughed shyly. “Would you like to see Herr Klamm?” K. begged for a sight of him. She pointed to a