On a rainy night, the speaker lies on his bed while his wife sits beside him, adjusting her stockings. He watches her in the mirror and touches her white slip. It is a quiet, intimate domestic scene, set against the wet street outside, where cars hum in the distance and people walk head-down against the cold.
The ending shifts the feeling. Caught up in this closeness, the speaker suddenly remembers he is "only a child," dreaming of a family of his own. The poem suggests that even with a wife in the room, he feels like a boy imagining adult life rather than living it, or perhaps that the warmth of the moment stirs an old longing. The "greylit window" returns at the start and the end, as if he never leaves that dreamy, suspended state. The mood is soft, hushed and lonely, with tenderness mixed with a faint sense of unreality, like watching your own life through glass.