id
not look soldierly or financial or artistic or anything definite at
all. He offered a clean slate for speculation. And, thank heaven! he
evidently wasn't going to spoil the fun by engaging me in conversation
later on. A decently unsociable man, anxious to be left alone.

The heartiness of his appetite, in contrast with his extreme fragility
of aspect and limpness of demeanor, assured me that he, too, had just
had influenza. I liked him for that. Now and again our eyes met and
were instantly parted. We managed, as a rule, to observe each other
indirectly. I was sure it was not merely because he had been ill that
he looked interesting. Nor did it seem to me that a spiritual
melancholy, though I imagined him sad at the best of times, was his
sole asset. I conjectured that he was clever. I thought he might also
be imaginative. At first glance I had mistrusted him. A shock of
white hair, combined with a young face and dark eyebrows, does somehow
make a man look like a charlatan. But it is foolish to be guided by an
accident of color. I had soon rejected my first impression of my
fellow-diner. I found him very sympathetic.

Anywhere but in England it would be impossible for two solitary men,
howsoever much reduced by influenza, to spend five or six days in the
same hostel and not exchange a single word. That is one of the charms
of England. Had Laider and I been born and bred in any other land than
Eng we should have become acquainted before the end of our first
evening in the small smoking-room, and have found ourselves irrevocably
committed to go on talking to each other throughout the rest of our
visit. We might, it is true, have happened to like each other more
than any one we had ever met. This off chance may have occurred to us
both. But it counted for nothing against the certain surrender of
quietude and liberty. We slightly bowed to each other as we entered or
left the dining-room or smoking-room, and as we met on the wide-spread
sands or in the shop that had a small and faded circulating library.
That was all. Our mutual aloofness was a positive bond between us.

Had he been much older than I, the responsibility for our silence would
of course have been his alone. But he was not, I judged, more than
five or six years ahead of me, and thus I might without impropriety
have taken it on myself to perform that hard and perilous feat which
English people call, with a shiver, "breaking the ice."