it was a good eleven months since he had been in town last.

"You see," insisted the other. "Solitude works like a sort of
poison. And then you perceive suggestions in faces--mysterious and
forcible, that no sound man would be bothered with. Of course you
do."

Geoffrey Renouard did not tell his journalist friend that the
suggestions of his own face, the face of a friend, bothered him as
much as the others. He detected a degrading quality in the touches
of age which every day adds to a human countenance. They moved and
disturbed him, like the signs of a horrible inward travail which
was frightfully apparent to the fresh eye he had brought from his
isolation in Malata, where he had settled after five strenuous
years of adventure and exploration.

"It's a fact," he said, "that when I am at home in Malata I see no
one consciously. I take the plantation boys for granted."

"Well, and we here take the people in the streets for granted. And
that's sanity."

The visitor said nothing to this for fear of engaging a discussion.
What he had come to seek in the editorial office was not
controversy, but information. Yet somehow he hesitated to approach
the subject. Solitary life makes a man reticent in respect of
anything in the nature of gossip, which those to whom chatting
about their kind is an everyday exercise regard as the commonest
use of speech.