land than Eng we should have become acquainted before the end of our
first evening in the small smoking-room, and have found ourselves
irrevocably committed to go on talking to each other throughout the rest
of our visit. We might, it is true, have happened to like each other more
than any one we had ever met. This off chance may have occurred to
us both. But it counted for nothing against the certain surrender of
quietude and liberty. We slightly bowed to each other as we entered or
left the dining-room or smoking-room, and as we met on the wide-spread
sands or in the shop that had a small and faded circulating library. That
was all. Our mutual aloofness was a positive bond between us.

Had he been much older than I, the responsibility for our silence
would of course have been his alone. But he was not, I judged, more
than five or six years ahead of me, and thus I might without impropriety
have taken it on myself to perform that hard and perilous feat which
English people call, with a shiver, "breaking the ice." He had reason,
therefore, to be as grateful to me as I to him. Each of us, not the less
frankly because silently, recognized his obligation to the other. And
when, on the last evening of my stay, the ice actually was broken there
was no ill-will between us: neither of us was to blame.

It was a Sunday evening. I had been out for a long last walk and
had come in very late to dinner. Laider had left his table almost directly
after I sat down to mine. When I entered the smoking-room I found him
reading a weekly review which I had bought the day before. It was a
crisis. He could not silently offer nor could I have silently accepted, six-pence. It was a
crisis. We faced it like men. He made, by word of
mouth, a graceful apology. Verbally, not by signs, I besought him to go
on reading. But this, of course, was a vain counsel of perfection. The
social code forced us to talk now. We obeyed it like men. To reassure