ain faces, types of discomfort and disease, which appealed from
the beginning to the end. A young Austrian, yellow as gold, and a livid
South-American, were of a lasting fascination to March.

What most troubled him, in his scrutiny of the crowd, was the difficulty
of assigning people to their respective nations, and he accused his
years of having dulled his perceptions; but perhaps it was from their
long disuse in his homogeneous American world. The Americans themselves
fused with the European races who were often so hard to make out; his
fellow-citizens would not be identified till their bad voices gave them
away; he thought the women's voices the worst.

At the springs, a line of young girls with a steady mechanical action
dipped the cups into the steaming source, and passed them impersonally
up to their owners. With the patients at the Muhlbrunn it was often a
half-hour before one's turn came, and at all a strict etiquette forbade
any attempt to anticipate it. The water was merely warm and flat, and
after the first repulsion one could forget it. March formed a childish
habit of counting ten between the sips, and of finishing the cup with a
gulp which ended it quickly; he varied his walks between cups by going
sometimes to a bridge at the end of the colonnade where a group of
Triestines were talking Venetian, and sometimes to the little Park
beyond the Kurhaus, where some old women were sweeping up from the close
sward the yellow leaves which the trees had untidily dropped overnight.
He liked to sit there and look at the city beyond the Tepl, where it
climbed the wooded heights in terraces till it lost its houses in
the skirts and folds of the forest. Most mornings it rained, quietly,
absent-mindedly, and this, with the chili in the air, deepened a
pleasant illusion of Quebec offered by the upper town across the stream;
but there were sunny mornings when the mountains shone softly through a
lustrous mist, and the air was almost warm.

Once in his walk he found himself the companion of Burnamy's employer,
whom he had sometimes noted in the line at the Muhlbrunn, waiting his
turn, cup in hand, with a face of sullen impatience. Stoller explained
that though you could have the water brought to you at your hotel, he
chose to go to the spring for the sake of the air; it was something you
had got to live through; before he had that young Burnamy to help him he
did not know what to do with his time, but now, every minute he