After three-quarters of an hour of standing¹ around, he became suddenly involved in a human contact. It was just the sort of thing that was likely to happen to him when he was in the mood of not wanting to see any one. So rigidly² did he sometimes guard his exposed self-consciousness that frequently he defeated his own purposes; as an actor who underplays a part sets up a craning forward, a stimulated³ emotional attention in an audience, and seems to create in others an ability to bridge the gap he has left open. Similarly we are seldom sorry for those who need and crave⁴ our pity — we reserve this for those who, by other means, make us exercise the abstract function of pity.

So Dick might, himself, have analyzed⁵ the incident that ensued. As he paced the Rue⁶ des Saintes-Anges he was spoken to by a thin-faced American, perhaps thirty, with an air of being scarred and a slight but sinister⁷ smile. As Dick gave him the light he requested, he placed him as one of a type of which he had been conscious since early youth — a type that loafed about tobacco stores with one elbow on the counter and watched, through heaven knew what small chink of the mind, the people who came in and out. Intimate to garages, where he had vague business conducted in undertones, to barber shops, to the lobbies of theatres — in such places, at any rate, Dick placed him. Sometimes the face bobbed up in one of Tad’s more savage⁸ cartoons — in boyhood Dick had often thrown an uneasy glance at the dim borderland of crime on which he stood.

“How do you like Paris, Buddy⁹?”

Not waiting for an answer the man tried to fit in his footsteps with Dick’s: “Where you from?” he asked encouragingly.

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