’I don’t pretend I understood him.  The views he let me have of himself were like those glimpses through the shifting rents in a thick fog—­bits of vivid and vanishing detail, giving no connected idea of the general aspect of a country.  They fed one’s curiosity without satisfying it; they were no good for purposes of orientation.  Upon the whole he was misleading.  That’s how I summed him up to myself after he left me late in the evening.  I had been staying at the Malabar House for a few days, and on my pressing invitation he dined with me there.’

CHAPTER 7

’An outward-bound mail-boat had come in that afternoon, and the big dining-room of the hotel was more than half full of people with a-hundred-pounds-round-the-world tickets in their pockets.  There were married couples looking domesticated and bored with each other in the midst of their travels; there were small parties and large parties, and lone individuals dining solemnly or feasting boisterously, but all thinking, conversing, joking, or scowling as was their wont at home; and just as intelligently receptive of new impressions as their trunks upstairs.  Henceforth they would be labelled as having passed through this and that place, and so would be their luggage.  They would cherish this distinction of their persons, and preserve the gummed tickets on their portmanteaus as documentary evidence, as the only permanent trace of their improving enterprise.  The dark-faced servants tripped without noise over the vast and polished floor; now and then a girl’s laugh would be heard, as innocent and empty as her mind, or, in a sudden hush of crockery, a few words in an affected drawl from some wit embroidering for the benefit of a grinning tableful the last funny story of shipboard scandal.  Two nomadic old maids, dressed up to kill, worked acrimoniously through the bill of fare, whispering to each other with faded lips, wooden-faced and bizarre, like two sumptuous scarecrows.  A little wine opened Jim’s heart and loosened his tongue.  His appetite was good, too, I noticed.  He seemed to have buried somewhere the opening episode of our acquaintance.  It was like a thing of which there would be no more question in this world.  And all the time I had before me these blue, boyish eyes looking straight into mine, this young face, these capable shoulders, the open bronzed forehead with a white line under the roots of clustering fair hair, this appearance appealing at sight to all my sympathies:  this frank aspect, the artless smile, the youthful seriousness.  He was of the right sort; he was one of us.  He talked soberly, with a sort of composed unreserve, and with a quiet bearing that might have been the outcome of manly self-control, of impudence, of callousness, of a colossal unconsciousness, of a gigantic deception.  Who can tell!  From our tone we might have been discussing a third person, a football match, last year’s weather.  My