Everyone focusses on the motor car. Lucrezia, the wife of Septimus, attempts to move him along. "But her husband, for they had been married four, five years now jumped, started, and said 'All right!' angrily, as if she had interupted him."
"People must notice; people must see," she thought.
Lucrezia remembers how the two of them had been happy only last autumn, before Septimus threatened suicide. Now she feels like a failure as she leads him to the park.
"She had a right to his arm, though it was without feeling. He would give her, who was so simple, so impulsive, only twenty-four, without friends in England, who had left Italy for his sake, a piece of bone."