“It was a wonderful spring Sunday morning. Georg Bendemann, a young businessman, was sitting in his office on the first floor of a low house on the bank of a river, along which stretched a whole row of houses of the same type, differing from one another, perhaps only in color and height. He had just finished a letter to a friend of his youth living abroad, then with deliberate slowness he put it into the envelope and, leaning his elbows on the desk, began to look out the window at the river, the bridge and the hills beginning to turn green on the other side...”