The warmth of the day was phenomenal. A light, vaporous mist, balmy and fragrant, as though millions of primrose-buds had opened beneath it and millions of jonquils had poured their sweetness into it, hung over the lintels of the houses and floated in and out of the doorways. Filmy white clouds, so feathery that they faded into the air at their outer edges, swept northwards over the roofs of the town; while the liquid blue of the sky, visible in fluctuating pools and estuaries between those fleecy vapours, seemed to obliterate everything that was hard and opaque from the whole terrestrial globe. So flowing and so diffused was the heaven above, that it seemed to spill and brim over, making the pavements underfoot appear like clouds too, and the patches of grass in that or this little garden like interstices of another, a second sky, whose receding depths were green instead of blue!

Groups of churchgoers were moving languidly past the gate of the Torp yard under the urge of their various pious purposes; and in his growing distress at the set, indrawn look on his girl’s face, Wolf felt mocked and taunted by the somnolent leisureliness of those people’s voices and by the fresh neatness of their clothes.