and slowly moving his fan he struck me somehow as a person on whom this fact wouldn’t sit too heavily.  He was of the type of those whom other people worry about, not of those who worry about other people.  Tall and strong, he had a handsome face, with a round head and close-curling hair; the whites of his eyes and the enamel of his teeth, under his brown moustache, gleamed vaguely in the lights of the Back Bay.  I made out that he was sunburnt, as if he lived much in the open air, and that he looked intelligent but also slightly brutal, though not in a morose way.  His brutality, if he had any, was bright and finished.  I had to tell him who I was, but even then I saw how little he placed me and that my explanations gave me in his mind no great identity or at any rate no great importance.  I foresaw that he would in intercourse make me feel sometimes very young and sometimes very old, caring himself but little which.  He mentioned, as if to show our companion that he might safely be left to his own devices, that he had once started from London to Bombay at three quarters of an hour’s notice.

“Yes, and it must have been pleasant for the people you were with!”

“Oh the people I was with—!” he returned; and his tone appeared to signify that such people would always have to come off as they could.  He asked if there were no cold drinks in the house, no lemonade, no iced syrups; in such weather something of that sort ought always to be kept going.  When his mother remarked that surely at the club they were kept going he went on:  “Oh yes, I had various things there; but you know I’ve walked down the hill since.  One should have something at either end.  May I ring and see?” He rang while Mrs. Nettlepoint observed that with the people they had in the house, an establishment reduced naturally at such a moment to its simplest expression—­they were burning up candle-ends and there were no luxuries—­she wouldn’t answer for the service.  The matter ended in her leaving the room in quest of cordials with the female domestic who had arrived in response to the bell and in whom Jasper’s appeal aroused no visible intelligence.

She remained away some time and I talked with her son, who was sociable but desultory and kept moving over the place, always with his fan, as if he were properly impatient.  Sometimes he seated himself an instant on the window-sill, and then I made him out in fact thoroughly good-looking—­a fine brown clean young athlete.  He failed to tell me on what special contingency his decision depended; he only alluded familiarly to an expected telegram, and I saw he was probably fond at no time of the trouble of explanations.  His mother’s absence was a sign that when it might be a question of gratifying him she had grown used to spare no pains, and I fancied her rummaging in some close storeroom, among old preserve-pots, while the dull maid-servant held the candle awry.  I don’t know whether this same vision was in