..
A porter, stumbling against Darrow's bags, roused him to the
fact that he still obstructed the platform, inert and
encumbering as his luggage.
"Crossing, sir?"
Was he crossing? He really didn't know; but for lack of any
more compelling impulse he followed the porter to the
luggage van, singled out his property, and turned to march
behind it down the gang-way. As the fierce wind shouldered
him, building up a crystal wall against his efforts, he felt
anew the derision of his case.
"Nasty weather to cross, sir," the porter threw back at him
as they beat their way down the narrow walk to the pier.
Nasty weather, indeed; but luckily, as it had turned out,
there was no earthly reason why Darrow should cross.
While he pushed on in the wake of his luggage his thoughts
slipped back into the old groove. He had once or twice run
across the man whom Anna Summers had preferred to him, and
since he had met her again he had been exercising his
imagination on the picture of what her married life must
have been. Her husband had struck him as a characteristic
specimen of the kind of American as to whom one is not quite
clear whether he lives in Europe in order to cultivate an
art, or cultivates an art as a pretext for living in Europe.
Mr. Leath's art was water-colour painting, but he practised
it furtively, almost clandestinely, with the disdain of a
man of the world for anything bordering on the professional,
while he devoted himself more openly, and with religious
seriousness, to the collection of enamelled snuff-boxes.
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