"I have no idea," I answered. "This guard would tell us, perhaps."
"Signalled in, sir," the man declared. "Two minutes late only."
My new acquaintance thanked me and lit a cigarette. He seemed in no hurry to depart, and I was equally anxious to engage him in conversation. For although he was dressed with the trim and quiet precision of the foreigner or man of affairs, there was something about his beardless face, his broadly humorous mouth, and easy, nonchalant bearing which suggested the person who juggled always with the ball of life.
"Marvellous!" he murmured, looking after the guard. "Two minutes late from Paris—and perhaps beyond. It is a wonderful service. Now, if I had come to meet any one, and had a pressing appointment immediately afterwards, this train would have been an hour late. As it is—ah, well, one is foolish to grumble," he added, with a little shrug of the shoulders.
"You, like me, then," I remarked, "are a loiterer."
He flashed a keen glance upon me.
"I see that I have met," he said slowly, "with someone of similar tastes to my own. I will confess at once that you are right. For myself I feel that there is nothing more interesting in this great city of yours than to watch the people coming and going from it. All your railway stations fascinate me, especially those which are the connecting links with other countries. Perhaps it is because I am an idle man, and must needs find amusement somewhere."
"Yet," I objected, "for a single face or personality which is suggestive, one sees a thousand of the type which only irritates—the great rank and file of the commonplace. I wonder, after all, whether the game is worth the candle."
"One in a thousand," he repeated thoughtfully. "Yet think what that one may mean—a walking drama, a tragedy, a comedy, an epitome of life or death. There is more to be read in the face of that one than in the three hundred pages of the novel over which we yawn ourselves to sleep. Here is the train! Now let us watch the people together—that is, if you really mean that you have no friends to look out for."
"I really mean it," I assured him. "I am here out of the idlest curiosity. I am by profession a scribbler, and I am in search of an idea."