thereabouts, with a curious faint
pea-green complexion. He was the wishy-washiest young man I ever beheld
in my life; an achromatic study: in spite of the delicate pea-greeniness
of his skin, all the colouring matter of the body seemed somehow to have
faded out of him. Perhaps he had been bleached. As he leant over the
taffrail, gazing down with open mouth and vacant stare at the water, I
took a good long look at him. He interested me much--because he was so
exceptionally uninteresting; a pallid, anaemic, indefinite hobbledehoy,
with a high, narrow forehead, and sketchy features. He had watery,
restless eyes of an insipid light blue; thin, yellow hair, almost white
in its paleness; and twitching hands that played nervously all the time
with a shadowy moustache. This shadowy moustache seemed to absorb as a
rule the best part of his attention; it was so sparse and so blanched
that he felt it continually--to assure himself, no doubt, of the reality
of its existence. I need hardly add that he wore an eye-glass.

He was an aristocrat, I felt sure; Eton and Christ Church: no ordinary
person could have been quite so flavourless. Imbecility like his is only
to be attained as the result of long and judicious selection.

He went on gazing in a vacant way at the water below, an ineffectual
patrician smile playing feebly round the corners of his mouth meanwhile.
Then he turned and stared at me as I lay back in my deck-chair. For a
minute he looked me over as if I were a horse for sale. When he had
finished inspecting me, he beckoned to somebody at the far end of the
quarter-deck.

The somebody sidled up with a deferential air which confirmed my belief
in the pea-green young man's aristocratic origin. It was such deference
as the British flunkey pays only to blue blood; for he has gradations of
flunkeydom. He is respectful to wealth; polite to acquired rank; but
servile only to hereditary nobility. Indeed, you can make a rough guess
at the social status of the person he addresses by observing which one
of his twenty-seven nicely graduated manners he adopts in addressing
him.

The pea-green young man glanced over in my direction, and murmured
something to the satellite, whose back was turned towards me. I felt
sure, from his attitude, he was asking whether I was the person he
suspected me to be. The satellite nodded assent, whereat the pea-green
young man, screwing up his face to fix his eye-glass, stared harder than
ever. He mu