I was watching the movie The 39 Steps, and, because I hadn’t reached the part where the meaning of the title is revealed, and thus didn’t know what it referred to, despite the fact that it had been mentioned, or alluded to, during scenes in which dialogue had occurred, so that it had caught my imagination, which had been colored by the mood and the atmosphere of the story, I kept picturing these steps as existing at the end of a corridor, in a stairwell that wound upward in the dark until it reached a door that was closed, and locked, and that did not have a handle by which one could open it, but from beneath which came a sliver of light that indicated a room or a hallway was beyond it.