This is simple enough, but several more points of interest may be mentioned as relevant. The season, between spring and summer, belongs to life in its carefree aspect. Piepsam's fatal rage arises not only because he cannot stop the cyclist, but also because God will not stop him; as Piepsam says to the crowd in his last moments: ``His justice is not of this world.''

Life is further characterized, in antithesis to Piepsam, as animal: the image of a dog, which appears at several places, is first given as the criterion of amiable, irrelevant interest aroused by life considered simply as a spectacle: a dog in a wagon is ``admirable,'' ``a pleasure to contemplate''; another wagon has no dog, and therefore is ``devoid of interest.'' Piepsam calls the cyclist ``cur'' and ``puppy'' among other things, and at the crisis of his fit a little fox-terrier stands before him and howls into his face. The ambulance is drawn by two ``charming'' little horses.

Piepsam is not, certainly, religious in any conventional sense. His religiousness is intimately, or dialectically, connected with his sinfulness; the two may in fact be identical. His unsuccessful strivings to give up drink are represented as religious strivings; he keeps a bottle in a wardrobe at home, and ``before this wardrobe Praisegod Piepsam had before now gone literally on his knees, and in his wrestlings had bitten his tongue -- and still in the end capitulated.''