duty and my husband is supposed to be paid for it. They’re beautiful stockings, look” — she
stretched out her legs, pulled her skirts above her knees, and herself contemplated the
stockings — “they’re beautiful stockings, but too fine, all the same, and not suitable for a
woman like me.”
Suddenly she broke off, laid her hand on K.’s hand as if to reassure him, and said:
“Hush, Bertold is watching us.” K. slowly raised his eyes. In the door of the courtroom a
young man was standing; he was small, his legs were slightly bowed, and he strove to add
dignity to his appearance by wearing a short, straggling reddish beard, which he was
always fingering. K. stared at him with interest, this was the first student of the mysterious
jurisprudence whom he had encountered, as it were, on human terms, a man, too, who
would presumably attain to one of the higher official positions some day. The student,
however, seemed to take not the slightest notice of K., he merely made a sign to the
woman with one finger, which he withdrew for a moment from his beard, and went over to
the window. The woman bent over K. and whispered: “Don’t be angry with me, please
don’t think badly of me, I must go to him now, and he’s a dreadful-looking creature, just
see what bandy legs he has. But I’ll come back in a minute and then I’ll go with you if
you’ll take me with you, I’ll go with you wherever you like, you can do with me what you
please, I’ll be glad if I can only get out of here for a long time, and I wish it could be
forever.” She gave K.’s hand a last caress, jumped up, and ran to the window. Despite
himself K.’s hand reached out after hers in the empty air. The woman really attracted him,
and after mature reflection he could find no valid reason why he should not yield to that
attraction. He dismissed without difficulty the fleeting suspicion that she might be trying to
lay a trap for him on the instructions of the Court. In what way could she entrap him?
Wasn’t he still free enough to flout the authority of this Court once and for all, at least as far as it concerned him? Could he not trust himself to this trifling extent? And her offer of
help had sounded sincere and was probably not worthless. And probably there could be no
more fitting revenge on the Examining Magistrate and his henchmen than to wrest this
woman from them and take her himself. Then some night the Examining Magistrate, after
long and arduous labor on his lying reports about K., might come to the woman’s bed and
find it empty. Empty because she had gone off with K., because the woman now standing
in the window, that supple, voluptuous warm body under the coarse heavy, dark dress,
belonged to K. and to K. alone.
After arguing himself in this way out of his suspicions, he began to feel that the
whispered conversation in the window was going on too long, and started knocking on the
table with his knuckles and then with his fist. The student glanced briefly at K. across the
woman’s shoulder, but did not let himself be put out, indeed moved closer to her and put
his arms around her. She drooped her head as if attentively listening to him, and as she did
so he kissed her loudly on the throat without at all interrupting his remarks. In this action
K. saw confirmed the tyranny which the student exercised over the woman, as she had
complained, and he sprang to his feet and began to pace up and down the room. With
occasional side-glances at the student he meditated how to get rid of him as quickly as
possible, and so it was not unwelcome to him when the fellow, obviously annoyed by his
walking up and down, which had turned by now into an angry trampling, said: “If you’re so
impatient, you can go away. There was nothing to hinder your going long ago, nobody
would have missed you. In fact, it was your duty to go away, and as soon as I came in too,