ng 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 ab