Page 137 - tender-is-the-night

XXI

After three-quarters of an hour of standing 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 rigidly
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 stimulated
emotional attention in an audience, and seems to create in
others an ability to bridge the gap he has left open. Simi-
larly we are seldom sorry for those who need and crave our
pity—we reserve this for those who, by other means, make
us exercise the abstract function of pity.
So Dick might, himself, have analyzed the incident that
ensued. As he paced the Rue des Saintes-Anges he was spo-
ken to by a thin-faced American, perhaps thirty, with an air
of being scarred and a slight but sinister 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 garag-
es, 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

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