To give him to understand that I was not communicative I took this information in silence. My coldness apparently did not impress him, and, sitting in the corner diagonally opposite to mine, he watched me eat. He was one of those men in whom personality disappears in the scientific observer. His features, manners, clothing, were mere accidents. He struck you as being wise, though with a measure of sympathy in his wisdom. Small in build, the dome of his forehead would have covered a man of twice his stature. A small, dark mustache was no more consciously a point of personal adornment than a patch of stonecrop to a rock. When he took off his cap his baldness, though more extensive than you would have expected in a man who couldn’t have been older than forty-five, was the finishing-touch of the staid. "You’ve been having a long sleep." "Yes." "Making up for lost time?" "Exactly." "Been at the front?" It was the kind of a question I was afraid of. I knew that if I said, "Yes," I should have to give details, and so I said, "No." "Look as if you had been." "Do I?" "Often leaves some sort of hang-over—" "It couldn’t do that in my case, because I wasn’t there." He tried another avenue of approach. "Drinkwater told me you were a Frenchman." "That seems to have been a mistake of our steward." "But you speak the language." "Yes, I speak it." "You must speak it very well." "Probably." "Have you lived much in France?" "Oh, on and off." "Had a position over there?" It seemed to be my turn to ask a question. I shot him a quick glance. "What sort of position do you mean?" "Oh, I didn’t know but what you might have been in a shop or an office—" So I looked like that! It was a surprise to me. I had thought he might mention the Embassy. My sense of superior standing was so strong that I expected another man of superior standing to see it at a glance. Contenting myself with a shake of the heads I felt his eyes on me with a graver stare. "Must have found it useful to speak French so well, especially at a time like this." I allowed that to pass without challenge. "If we should ever go into the war a fellow like you could make himself handy in a lot of ways." We were therefore not in the war. I was glad to add that to my list of facts. "I should try," I assented, feeling that the words committed me to nothing. "Wonder you weren’t tempted to pitch in as it was. A lot of our young Americans did—chaps who found themselves over there." "I wasn’t one of them." "Poor Drinkwater, now—he went over with me as my stenographer in the spring of that year; and when the thing broke out—" "He went?" "Yes, he went." "And didn’t get much good from it." "Oh, I don’t know about that. Depends—doesn’t it?—on what we mean by good. You fellows—" I shot him another glance, but I don’t think he noticed that I objected to being classed with Drinkwater. "You fellows—" he began again.