Selby again.

"I'm goin'," replied Waters, turning from him.

He sent the girl a look that was a claim upon her. "Pleased to meet
ye," he said clearly. "Me name's Waters; I'm an American too."

Selby bounced in his chair behind him, squeaking and spluttering; the
girl, surprised and uncertain, stammered something. But her face, for
all her embarrassment, acknowledged his claim. He took his reply from
it, nodded slowly in satisfied comprehension and walked past her
towards the door. His worn blouse glimmered white in the shadows of
the entry; and he was gone.

Behind him, the office was suddenly uncomfortable and cheerless.
Selby was no longer sure of himself and the figure he had cut; the
girl looked at him with eyes in which he read a doubt.

"You don't want to take any notice of that fellow," he blustered.
"He'd no right to speak to you. He's just a tough in trouble with the
police and wanting me to fix it for him. He won't come here again in
a hurry."

"But" she hesitated. "Isn't he an American?" she ventured.

"Huh!" snorted Selby. "Americans like him are three for a nickel
round here."

"Oh!" she murmured, and sat looking at him while he plunged into the
question of "terms." His glasses wobbled on his nose; his hands moved
jerkily as he talked, fidgeting with loose papers on his desk; but
his weak eyes did not return her gaze.

Nikolaieff, which yet has a quality of its own, has this in common
with other abiding places of men that life there shapes itself as a
posture or a progress in the measure that one gives to it or receives
from it. Tim Waters, who fed upon life like a leech, returned to it
after a six weeks' enforced absence (the protocol had valued a
damaged istvostchik at that price) with a show of pallor under the
bronze on his skin and a Rip van Winkle feeling of having slumbered
through far-reaching changes. During his absence the lingering
southern autumn had sloped towards winter; the trees along the sad
boulevard were already leafless; the river had changed from luminous
blue to the blank hue of steel. The men in the streets went fortified
with sheepskins or furs; Waters, still in his linen blouse, with
hands sunk deep in his pockets and shoulders hunched against the acid
of the air, passed among them as conspicuous as a naked man, marking
as he moved the stares he drew across high, raised collars.

He was making his way across the city to his old haunts by the
waterside; he crossed the G