The above sequence of thoughts was entirely unsympathetic and it was followed by a feeling of satisfaction that I, at any rate, was not suffering from insomnia.  I could always sleep in the end.  In the end.  Escape into a nightmare.  Wouldn’t he revel in that if he could!  But that wasn’t for him.  He had to toss about open-eyed all night and get up weary, weary.  But oh, wasn’t I weary, too, waiting for a sleep without dreams.

I heard the door behind me open.  I had been standing with my face to the window and, I declare, not knowing what I was looking at across the road—­the Desert of Sahara or a wall of bricks, a landscape of rivers and forests or only the Consulate of Paraguay.  But I had been thinking, apparently, of Mr. Blunt with such intensity that when I saw him enter the room it didn’t really make much difference.  When I turned about the door behind him was already shut.  He advanced towards me, correct, supple, hollow-eyed, and smiling; and as to his costume ready to go out except for the old shooting jacket which he must have affectioned particularly, for he never lost any time in getting into it at every opportunity.  Its material was some tweed mixture; it had gone inconceivably shabby, it was shrunk from old age, it was ragged at the elbows; but any one could see at a glance that it had been made in London by a celebrated tailor, by a distinguished specialist.  Blunt came towards me in all the elegance of his slimness and affirming in every line of his face and body, in the correct set of his shoulders and the careless freedom of his movements, the superiority, the inexpressible superiority, the unconscious, the unmarked, the not-to-be-described, and even not-to-be-caught, superiority of the naturally born and the perfectly finished man of the world, over the simple young man.  He was smiling, easy, correct, perfectly delightful, fit to kill

He had come to ask me, if I had no other engagement, to lunch with him and his mother in about an hour’s time.  He did it in a most degage tone.  His mother had given him a surprise.  The completest . . .  The foundation of his mother’s psychology was her delightful unexpectedness.  She could never let things be (this in a peculiar tone which he checked at once) and he really would take it very kindly of me if I came to break the tete-a-tete for a while (that is if I had no other engagement.  Flash of teeth).  His mother was exquisitely and tenderly absurd.  She had taken it into her head that his health was endangered in some way.  And when she took anything into her head . . .  Perhaps I might find something to say which would reassure her.  His mother had two long conversations with Mills on his passage through Paris and had heard of me (I knew how that thick man could speak of people, he interjected ambiguously) and his mother, with an insatiable curiosity for anything that was rare (filially humorous accent here and a softer flash of teeth), was very anxious to have me presented to her (courteous intonation, but no teeth).  He hoped I wouldn’t mind if she treated me a little as an “interesting young man.”  His mother had never got over her seventeenth year, and the manner of the spoilt beauty of at least three counties at the back of the Carolinas.  That again got overlaid by the sans-facon of a grande dame of the Second Empire.