ten minutes before. I was sure he was fond of billiards.

"Rush? not in the least. I take it uncommon easy."

"Ah I'm bound to say you do!" Mrs. Nettlepoint returned with
inconsequence. I guessed at 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
struggle alone. But as he stood there smiling and slowly moving his fan
he struck me somehow as a person on whom this fact wouldn't sit too
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 how little he placed 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, caring himself but little which. He mentioned, as if
to show our companion 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 returned; and his tone appeared to