With a failed clerkship and nothing in his stomach since the last house he passed, a 26-year-old Robert Carl trudges along a country road at night. His hunger is so overwhelming that he has become delirious. In the distance, he sees a light and begins shifting his direction towards it. When he knocks on the door of the cottage the light is emanating from, a young woman opens it. Instead of introducing himself to her, he merely says he is hungry and rushes inside. She begins to object, but seeing as he only asks for a warm meal, she obliges. Through his mental haze, Robert notices the cottage is scrupulously tidy. The young woman seats him at a table beneath a shelf of flowers hanging from the ceiling. Once she has finished preparing Robert’s meal, she slips inside one of the cottage’s rooms. Robert eats briskly, then hears muffled thuds and grinding from the room. The door opens slightly, allowing a cat to emerge. Robert notices its pattern and shape cause it to look more menacing that it is. He then realizes the previously calm atmosphere has slipped into an off-kilter uneasiness.

The young woman comes to the doorway, then freezes, her gaze fixed on something above his head. She retreats into the room, and as he stands quickly to follow her, Robert knocks his head against the flower shelf above the table. Something falls onto him, and when he picks himself off the floor, he realizes it’s a gun. Enabled by its power, Robert slips into the room and sees the woman. She has curled up in a large chair, a table protecting her from the doorway. She lays still, defeated and terrified, and Robert gleefully roams her home with his freedom newly found in the gun. He begins looking for her purse, then sees it tucked away on a shelf. As he reaches for it, he is taken aback by another man staring at him from the shelf’s mirror. The man, a reflection of Robert, is grizzled and radiates malice. The reflection raises his gun to his lips and fires, killing himself and Robert’s rush of impulsivity to rob the young woman. He begins laughing for considering himself strong enough to be amongst the thieves of society, then says it would be better to leave those crimes to “second-story men”. Robert hurriedly enters the young woman’s room to apologize for seeming so imposing and threatening with the gun. He explains he hadn’t known she kept one, then tells her he will leave immediately. As he exits the cottage and starts on the road, she shakily holds a light for him. After a while, she goes back inside, leaving Robert thinking of how he could never be a thief, but almost was.