in white
flannel and carrying a large fan.

'Well, my dear, have you decided?' his mother continued, with some irony
in her tone. 'He hasn't yet made up his mind, and we sail at ten
o'clock!'

'What does it matter, when my things are put up?' said the young man.
'There is no crowd at this moment; there will be cabins to spare. I'm
waiting for a telegram--that will settle it. I just walked up to the
club to see if it was come--they'll send it there because they think the
house is closed. Not yet, but I shall go back in twenty minutes.'

'Mercy, how you rush about in this temperature!' his mother exclaimed,
while I reflected that it was perhaps _his_ billiard-balls I had heard
ten minutes before. I was sure he was fond of billiards.

'Rush? not in the least. I take it uncommonly easy.'

'Ah, I'm bound to say you do,' Mrs. Nettlepoint exclaimed,
inconsequently. I divined that there was a certain tension between the
pair and a want of consideration on the young man's part, arising
perhaps from selfishness. His mother was nervous, in suspense, wanting
to be at rest as to whether she should have his company on the voyage or
be obliged to make it alone. But as he stood there smiling and slowly
moving his fan he struck me somehow as a person on whom this fact would
not sit very heavily. He was of the type of those whom other people
worry about, not of those who worry about other people. Tall and
strong, he had a handsome face, with a round head and close-curling
hair; the whites of his eyes and the enamel of his teeth, under his
brown moustache, gleamed vaguely in the lights of the Back Bay. I made
out that he was sunburnt, as if he lived much in the open air, and that
he looked intelligent but also slightly brutal, though not in a morose
way. His brutality, if he had any, was bright and finished. I had to
tell him who I was, but even then I saw that he failed to place me and
that my explanations gave me in his mind no great identity or at any
rate no great importance. I foresaw that he would in intercourse make me
feel sometimes very young and sometimes very old. He mentioned, as if to
show his mother that he might safely be left to his own devices, that he
had once started from London to Bombay at three-quarters of an hour's
notice.

'Yes, and it must have been pleasant for the people you were with!'

'Oh, the people I was with----!' he rejoined; and his tone appeared to
signify that such people would always have to c