Bitten by the frost, she hurried down the street. There was a small woman standing in the entrance of the supermarket, between the automatic doors, in front of the white wall, selling the street magazine Kats&Dogz. The way the woman said "please" made her heart cringe, but she walked on. "She has a beautiful voice.", she had thought. While passing, she had looked at the woman in the entrance. She had had to smile at her. And she felt how cruel it had been to smile at her. While smiling at her friends was reassuring, smiling at this woman felt like an act of lording her own superiority over her. She had smiled, because she was a mindless person, because she was a careless person, because she was a Person who smiled at people's misery? She did not have time to think about it. She had to go back to work.

   Later, when she sat at her desk, she thought of the woman again. Why hadn't she stopped? Why hadn't she bought her magazine? And when people thought about other things as hard as they did—how can I make a piece of metal fly from Europe to Australia with people sitting in it—why could they not be able to help each other, so that nobody had to suffer?

   After work she went back to the supermarket. It was already closed. Nobody was there, the streets were deserted. All at once she felt very lonely. As if she had been searching for a friend and could not find her. And she realized that nobody cared for her feelings. Even her boyfriend did not, she thought. But she was supposed to be happy. Bitten by the frost, she hurried down the street.