The crowd was enormous. Much larger than the great gatherings you had got used to in the past and learnt to ignore. And the cause had not been thought of before. The demonstration had suddenly emerged out of nothing and was still growing, nobody could say how. And nobody tried. He was in a group standing out from the rest of the crowd, without anybody having noticed that. Standing there engulfed by the silence he would not have noticed himself either, if his feet had not begun to feel cold as if an ice-cold wind was blowing beneath him. As he looked down he felt a slight catch at the back of his head, but it was not until much later he clearly understood what he had seen. Inside the government building it dawned very slowly on the 341 men and women who were the lawmakers of the land. But when the panic broke out it sounded like a scream: “The voters are speaking!”. At that moment time came to a standstill. From the beginning he had been slow in grasping new trends. Phlegmatic, inattentive, indolent—words came cheaply, he used a lot of them—he lacked the ability of keeping pace, of being up to date. And when finally he realized that himself, he tried desperately to keep pace. He was bound to fail. The only logical outcome of his enthusiasm was that everything around him accelerated, all he achieved was to become a negative indicator of the ever changing trends: When with a burning heart he was advocating a viewpoint or was trying to be trendy, everybody knew that it was outmoded.