The above sequence of thoughts was entirely unsympathetic and it
was followed by a feeling of satisfaction that I, at any rate, was
not suffering from insomnia. I could always sleep in the end. In
the end. Escape into a nightmare. Wouldn't he revel in that if he
could! But that wasn't for him. He had to toss about open-eyed
all night and get up weary, weary. But oh, wasn't I weary, too,
waiting for a sleep without dreams.
I heard the door behind me open. I had been standing with my face
to the window and, I declare, not knowing what I was looking at
across the road--the Desert of Sahara or a wall of bricks, a
landscape of rivers and forests or only the Consulate of Paraguay.
But I had been thinking, apparently, of Mr. Blunt with such
intensity that when I saw him enter the room it didn't really make
much difference. When I turned about the door behind him was
already shut. He advanced towards me, correct, supple, hollow-
eyed, and smiling; and as to his costume ready to go out except for
the old shooting jacket which he must have affectioned
particularly, for he never lost any time in getting into it at
every opportunity. Its material was some tweed mixture; it had
gone inconceivably shabby, it was shrunk from old age, it was
ragged at the elbows; but any one could see at a glance that it had
been made in London by a celebrated tailor, by a distinguished
specialist. Blunt came towards me in all the elegance of his
slimness and affirming in every line of his face and body, in the
correct set of his shoulders and the careless freedom of his
movements, the superiority, the inexpressible superiority, the
unconscious, the unmarked, the not-to-be-described, and even not-
to-be-caught, superiority of the naturally born and the perfectly
finished man of the world, over the simple young man. He was
smiling, easy, correct, perfectly delightful, fit to kill
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