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 offhand 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 mustache, waxed up behind 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.

"We shall not be here," I briskly, but fatuously, added.

"We shall not be here. No," he droned, "but the museum will still
be just where it is. And the reading-room just where it is. And people
will be able to go and read there." He inhaled sharply, and a spasm as
of actual pain contorted his features.

I wondered what train of thought poor Soames had been following.
He did not enlighten me when he said, after a long pause, "You think I
haven't minded."