"Conrad, Joseph - Within The Tides" - читать интересную книгу автора (Conrad Joseph)

"Very touching. The old boy sentimentalises over the past now and
then."

"I really don't know why I accepted," continued the other.
"Sentiment does not move me very easily. Old Dunster was civil to
me of course, but he did not even inquire how I was getting on with
my silk plants. Forgot there was such a thing probably. I must
say there were more people there than I expected to meet. Quite a
big party."

"I was asked," remarked the newspaper man. "Only I couldn't go.
But when did you arrive from Malata?"

"I arrived yesterday at daylight. I am anchored out there in the
bay - off Garden Point. I was in Dunster's office before he had
finished reading his letters. Have you ever seen young Dunster
reading his letters? I had a glimpse of him through the open door.
He holds the paper in both hands, hunches his shoulders up to his
ugly ears, and brings his long nose and his thick lips on to it
like a sucking apparatus. A commercial monster."

"Here we don't consider him a monster," said the newspaper man
looking at his visitor thoughtfully.

"Probably not. You are used to see his face and to see other
faces. I don't know how it is that, when I come to town, the
appearance of the people in the street strike me with such force.
They seem so awfully expressive."

"And not charming."

"Well - no. Not as a rule. The effect is forcible without being
clear. . . . I know that you think it's because of my solitary
manner of life away there."

"Yes. I do think so. It is demoralising. You don't see any one
for months at a stretch. You're leading an unhealthy life."

The other hardly smiled and murmured the admission that true enough
it was a good eleven months since he had been in town last.

"You see," insisted the other. "Solitude works like a sort of
poison. And then you perceive suggestions in faces - mysterious
and forcible, that no sound man would be bothered with. Of course
you do."

Geoffrey Renouard did not tell his journalist friend that the
suggestions of his own face, the face of a friend, bothered him as
much as the others. He detected a degrading quality in the touches