“I also am going to Panama.”
“Are you, indeed?” said she. “Then I shall not feel so terribly alone and disconsolate. I have been looking forward with such fear to that journey on from St. Thomas.”
“You shall not be disconsolate, if I can help it,” he said. “I am not much of a traveller myself, but what I can do I will.”
“Oh, thank you!”
“It is a pity Mr. Morris is not going on with you. He’s at home everywhere, and knows the way across the isthmus as well as he does down Regent Street.”
“Your friend, you mean!”
“My friend, if you call him so; and indeed I hope he is, for I like him. But I don’t know more of him than I do of you. I also am as much alone as you are. Perhaps more so.”
“But,” she said, “a man never suffers in being alone.”
“Oh! does he not? Don’t think me uncivil, Miss Viner, if I say that you may be mistaken in that. You feel your own shoe when it pinches, but do not realise the tight boot of your neighbour.”
“Perhaps not,” said she. And then there was a pause, during which she pretended to look again for the orange-groves. “But there are worse things, Mr. Forrest, than being alone in the world. It is often a woman’s lot to wish that she were let alone.” Then she left him and retreated to the side of the grumpy gentleman’s wife, feeling perhaps that it might be prudent to discontinue a conversation, which, seeing that Mr. Forrest was quite a stranger to her, was becoming particular.