its pages, clearly for no purpose, when the door to the ante-room opened even clients would appear from the half darkness and bow timidly to him - they wanted to attract his attention but were not sure whether he had seen them - all this activity was circling around K.

with him at its centre while he compiled the list of words he would need, then looked them up in the dictionary, then wrote them out, then practised their pronunciation and finally tried to learn them by heart. The good intentions he had had earlier, though, seemed to have left him completely, it was the Italian who had caused him all this effort and sometimes he became so angry with him that he buried the dictionary under some papers firmly intending to do no more preparation, but then he realised he could not walk up and down in the cathedral with the