Garnett looked after him with a musing smile.  The two had exchanged views on life for two years without so much as knowing each other’s names.  Garnett was a newspaper correspondent whose work kept him mainly in London, but on his periodic visits to Paris he lodged in a dingy hotel of the Latin Quarter, the chief merit of which was its nearness to the cheap and excellent restaurant where the two Americans had made acquaintance.  But Garnett’s assiduity in frequenting the place arose, in the end, less from the excellence of the food than from the enjoyment of his old friend’s conversation.  Amid the flashy sophistications of the Parisian life to which Garnett’s trade introduced him, the American sage’s conversation had the crisp and homely flavor of a native dish—­one of the domestic compounds for which the exiled palate is supposed to yearn.  It was a mark of the old man’s impersonality that, in spite of the interest he inspired, Garnett had never got beyond idly wondering who he might be, where he lived, and what his occupations were.  He was presumably a bachelor—­a man of family ties, however relaxed, though he might have been as often absent from home would not have been as regularly present in the same place—­and there was about him a boundless desultoriness which renewed Garnett’s conviction that there is no one on earth as idle as an American who is not busy.  From certain allusions it was plain that he had lived many years in Paris, yet he had not taken the trouble to adapt his tongue to the local inflections, but spoke French with the accent of one who has formed his conception of the language from a phrase-book.

The city itself seemed to have made as little impression on him as its speech.  He appeared to have no artistic or intellectual curiosities, to remain untouched by the complex appeal of Paris, while preserving, perhaps the more strikingly from his very detachment, that odd American astuteness which seems the fruit of innocence rather than of experience.  His nationality revealed itself again in a mild interest in the political problems of his adopted country, though they appeared to preoccupy him only as illustrating the boundless perversity of mankind.  The exhibition of human folly never ceased to divert him, and though his examples of it seemed mainly drawn from the columns of one exiguous daily paper, he found there matter for endless variations on his favorite theme.  If this monotony of topic did not weary the younger man, it was because he fancied he could detect under it the tragic implication of the fixed idea—­of some great moral upheaval which had flung his friend stripped and starving on the desert island of the little cafe where they met.  He hardly knew wherein he read this revelation—­whether in the resigned shabbiness of the sage’s dress, the impartial courtesy of his manner, or the shade of apprehension which lurked, indescribably, in his guileless yet suspicious eye.  There were moments when Garnett could only define him by saying that he looked like a man who had seen a ghost.