Staring from across the table was a man alone, big oblong foreigner dwarfing his neighbours, and piteous, not to be looked at as the others could who fitted the scene; not so much sitting at table with the rest as set there filling a space. His eyes had turned towards a nasal voice suddenly prevailing; sombre brown, wistfully sulking below eyebrows lifted in a wide forehead that stopped unexpectedly soon at a straight fence of hair. Oblong beard reaching the top of stiff brown coat. Russian, probably the Chopin player. “Anyone’s a fool who passes Parrus without stopping off at least a few hours.” A small man at the end of the row, opaque blue eyes in a peaky face, little peaked beard, neat close-fitting dress clothes. Incongruous far-travelled guest of little Switzerland. He was next the window, with the nice man on his right. Then came the big Russian exactly opposite and again naïvely staring across, and beyond him a tall lady in a home-made silk blouse united by a fichu to the beginning of a dark skirt; coronet of soft, coiled white hair above a firmly padded face with polished skin, pink-flushed, glimmering into the talk, that was now a debate about to-morrow’s chances, into which sounded women’s voices from the table behind, smooth and clear, but clipped, free-masonish like the others. To the right of the coronetted lady an iron-grey man, her husband, gaunt and worn, with peevishly suffering eyes set towards the door on the far side of the room. Fastidious eyes, full of knowledge, turned away. He was the last in the row and beyond him the table stretched away to the end wall through whose door the servants came and went. His opponents were out of sight beyond the bass-voiced woman on the left, whose effect was so strangely large and small: a face horse-like and delicate, and below her length of face increased by the pyramid of hair above her pointed fringe, a meeting of old lace and good jewellery. To her own right the firm insensitive hand, that wore a signet ring and made pellets of its bread, belonged to just the man she had imagined, dark and liverish, but with an unexpectedly flattened profile whose moustache, dropping to sharp points, gave it an expression faintly Chinese; a man domestic but accustomed to expand in unrestricted statement, impatiently in leash to the surrounding equality of exchange. Beyond him his wife, sitting rather eagerly forward, fair and plump, with features grown expressionless in their long service of holding back her thoughts, but, betraying their secret in a brow, creased faintly by straining upwards as if in perpetual incredulity of an ever-present spectacle, and become now the open page of the story the mouth and eyes were not allowed to tell. At her side a further figure and beyond it the head of the table unoccupied, leaving the party to be its own host.