ce.
Hadn't he understood its deplorable meaning? "You may well forgive me,"
he continued, and went on a little moodily, "All these staring people in
court seemed such fools that--that it might have been as I supposed."

'This opened suddenly a new view of him to my wonder. I looked at him
curiously and met his unabashed and impenetrable eyes. "I can't put up
with this kind of thing," he said, very simply, "and I don't mean to. In
court it's different; I've got to stand that--and I can do it too."

'I don't pretend I understood him. The views he let me have of himself
were like those glimpses through the shifting rents in a thick fog--bits
of vivid and vanishing detail, giving no connected idea of the general
aspect of a country. They fed one's curiosity without satisfying it;
they were no good for purposes of orientation. Upon the whole he was
misleading. That's how I summed him up to myself after he left me late
in the evening. I had been staying at the Malabar House for a few days,
and on my pressing invitation he dined with me there.'

CHAPTER 7

'An outward-bound mail-boat had come in that afternoon, and the
big dining-room of the hotel was more than half full of people with
a-hundred-pounds-round-the-world tickets in their pockets. There were
married couples looking domesticated and bored with each other in the
midst of their travels; there were small parties and large parties,
and lone individuals dining solemnly or feasting boisterously, but all
thinking, conversing, joking, or scowling as was their wont at home;
and just as intelligently receptive of new impressions as their trunks
upstairs. Henceforth they would be labelled as having passed through
this and that place, and so would be their luggage. They would cherish
this distinction of their persons, and preserve the gummed tickets on
their portmanteaus as documentary evidence, as the only permanent trace
of their improving enterprise. The dark-faced servants tripped without
noise over the vast and polished floor; now and then a girl's laugh
would be heard, as innocent and empty as her mind, or, in a sudden hush
of crockery, a few words in an affected drawl from some wit embroidering
for the benefit of a grinning tableful the last funny story of shipboard
scandal. Two nomadic old maids, dressed up to kill, worked acrimoniously
through the bill of fare, whispering to each other with faded lips,
wooden-faced and bizarre, like two sumptuous scarecrows.