A girl who he judged by her frowzled hair and her heavy eyes had just been aroused from sleep, stood behind the counter pouring hot and steaming coffee into thick china cups. The smell to the hungry man was divine. Fairfax's mouth watered. From the one pot the coffee came out with milk added, and from another the liquid poured clear. Fairfax asked for coffee with milk and a sandwich, and as the girl pushed the plate with hunks of bread and ham towards him, he asked, "How much, please?" The girl raised her heavy lids. Her gray eyes could have sparkled if she had been less sleepy. She glanced at him and responded in a soft brogue—
"Two cints a cup. Sandwiches two cints apiece."
He took his breakfast over to the table where a customer was already seated before a huge breakfast. After watching Fairfax for a few moments, this man said to him—
"Got a rattling good appetite, Mister."
"I have, indeed," Fairfax returned, "and I'm going to begin over again."
The man wore a red shirt under his coat, his battered bowler was a-cock on his head. Antony often recalled Sanders as he looked that morning. His face from his neck up was clean. He exuded water and brown soap; he had a bright healthy colour; he was a good-looking workman, but his hands! Fairfax thought them appalling—grimed with coal. They could never be washed clean, Fairfax reflected, and one finger on the left hand was missing.
"Stranger?" the man asked him. "Just going through?"
And as Fairfax replied, he thought to himself, "He
doesn't dream how strange I am and that I don't even know the name of the town."
He asked the man, "Much going on here?"