He seemed not to hear me nor even to see me. I felt that his
behaviour made me ridiculous in the eyes of the other man. The
gangway between the two rows of tables at the Vingtieme was
hardly more than two feet wide (Rose and Berthe, in their
ministrations, had always to edge past each other, quarrelling in
whispers as they did so), and any one at the table abreast of
yours was practically at yours. I thought our neighbour was
amused at my failure to interest Soames, and so, as I could not
explain to him that my insistence was merely charitable, I
became silent. Without turning my head, I had him well within
my range of vision. I hoped I looked less vulgar than he in
contrast with Soames. I was sure he was not an Englishman, but
what WAS his nationality? Though his jet-black hair was en
brosse, I did not think he was French. To Berthe, who waited
on him, he spoke French fluently, but with a hardly native idiom
and accent. I gathered that this was his first visit to the
Vingtieme; but Berthe was off-hand in her manner to him: he
had not made a good impression. His eyes were handsome, but-
-like the Vingtieme's tables--too narrow and set too close
together. His nose was predatory, and the points of his
moustache, waxed up beyond his nostrils, gave a fixity to his
smile. Decidedly, he was sinister. And my sense of discomfort
in his presence was intensified by the scarlet waistcoat which
tightly, and so unseasonably in June, sheathed his ample chest.
This waistcoat wasn't wrong merely because of the heat, either.
It was somehow all wrong in itself. It wouldn't have done on
Christmas morning. It would have struck a jarring note at the
first night of `Hernani.' I was trying to account for its
wrongness when Soames suddenly and strangely broke silence.
`A hundred years hence!' he murmured, as in a trance.