This bit of self-praise, of course, fitted excellently the laborious inanity of the whole conversation.  The whole thing strengthened in me that obscure feeling of life being but a waste of days, which, half-unconsciously, had driven me out of a comfortable berth, away from men I liked, to flee from the menace of emptiness . . . and to find inanity at the first turn.  Here was a man of recognized character and achievement disclosed as an absurd and dreary chatterer.  And it was probably like this everywhere—­from east to west, from the bottom to the top of the social scale.

A great discouragement fell on me.  A spiritual drowsiness.  Giles’ voice was going on complacently; the very voice of the universal hollow conceit.  And I was no longer angry with it.  There was nothing original, nothing new, startling, informing, to expect from the world; no opportunities to find out something about oneself, no wisdom to acquire, no fun to enjoy.  Everything was stupid and overrated, even as Captain Giles was.  So be it.

The name of Hamilton suddenly caught my ear and roused me up.

“I thought we had done with him,” I said, with the greatest possible distaste.

“Yes.  But considering what we happened to hear just now I think you ought to do it.”

“Ought to do it?” I sat up bewildered.  “Do what?”

Captain Giles confronted me very much surprised.

“Why!  Do what I have been advising you to try.  You go and ask the Steward what was there in that letter from the Harbour Office.  Ask him straight out.”

I remained speechless for a time.  Here was something unexpected and original enough to be altogether incomprehensible.  I murmured, astounded: 

“But I thought it was Hamilton that you . . .”

“Exactly.  Don’t you let him.  You do what I tell you.  You tackle that Steward.  You’ll make him jump, I bet,” insisted Captain Giles, waving his smouldering pipe impressively at me.  Then he took three rapid puffs at it.

His aspect of triumphant acuteness was indescribable.  Yet the man remained a strangely sympathetic creature.  Benevolence radiated from him ridiculously, mildly, impressively.  It was irritating, too.  But I pointed out coldly, as one who deals with the incomprehensible, that I didn’t see any reason to expose myself to a snub from the fellow.  He was a very unsatisfactory steward and a miserable wretch besides, but I would just as soon think of tweaking his nose.

“Tweaking his nose,” said Captain Giles in a scandalized tone.  “Much use it would be to you.”

That remark was so irrelevant that one could make no answer to it.  But the sense of the absurdity was beginning at last to exercise its well-known fascination.  I felt I must not let the man talk to me any more.  I got up, observing curtly that he was too much for me—­that I couldn’t make him out.

Before I had time to move away he spoke again in a changed tone of obstinacy and puffing nervously at his pipe.