“And I am a person to be reckoned with.”
The other man went on looking at the floor, as if he were alone in the room. There was a pause.
“You have heard of me, then?” Heyst said at length, looking up.
“I should think so! We have been staying at Schomberg's hotel.”
“Schom—” Heyst choked on the word.
“What's the matter, Mr. Heyst?”
“Nothing. Nausea,” Heyst said resignedly. He resumed his former attitude of meditative indifference. “What is this reckoning you are talking about?” he asked after a time, in the quietest possible tone. “I don't know you.”
“It's obvious that we belong to the same—social sphere,” began Mr. Jones with languid irony. Inwardly he was as watchful as he could be. “Something has driven you out—the originality of your ideas, perhaps. Or your tastes.”
Mr. Jones indulged in one of his ghastly smiles. In repose his features had a curious character of evil, exhausted austerity; but when he smiled, the whole mask took on an unpleasantly infantile expression. A recrudescence of the rolling thunder invaded the room loudly, and passed into silence.
“You are not taking this very well,” observed Mr. Jones. This was what he said, but as a matter of fact he thought that the business was shaping quite satisfactorily. The man, he said to himself, had no stomach for a fight. Aloud he continued: “Come! You can't expect to have it always your own way. You are a man of the world.”