Mr. Baruch smiled that quiet, friendly smile of his, and put the box carefully into a drawer of his desk.
The American Vice-Consulate at Nikolaief was housed in a single great room lighted by a large window at one end overlooking the port and the wharves, so that, entering from the gloom of the little landing, one looked along the length of it as towards the mouth of a cave. Desks, tables, a copying-press and a typewriter were all its gear; it was a place as avidly specialized for its purpose as an iron foundry, but now, for the moment, it was redeemed from its everyday barrenness by the two figures upon the floor near the entrance.
The peddler lay at full length, a bundle of strange travel-wrecked clothes, suggesting a lay figure in his limp inertness and the loose sprawl of his limbs. Beside him on the boards, trim in white blouse and tweed skirt, kneeled the vice-consul's clerk, Miss Pilgrim. She had one arm under the man's head, and with the other was drawing towards her his fallen bundle of rugs to serve as a pillow. As she bent, her gentle face, luminously fair, was over the swart, clenched countenance of the unconscious man, whose stagnant eyes seemed set on her in an unwinking stare.
Mr. Baruch bent to help her place the bundle in position. She lifted her face to him in recognition. Selby, fretting to and fro, snorted.
"Blamed if I'd have touched him," he said. "Most likely he never saw soap in his life. A hobo that's what he is just a hobo."
Miss Pilgrim gave a little deprecating smile and stood up. She was a slight girl, serious and gentle, and half her waking life was spent in counteracting the effects of Selby 's indigestion and ill-temper. Mr. Baruch was still stooping to the bundle of rugs.
"Oh, that'll be all right, Mr. Baruch," she assured him. "He's quite comfortable now."
Mr. Baruch, still stooping, looked up at her.
"I am seeing the kind of rugs he has," he answered. "I am interested in rugs. You do not know rugs no?"
"No," replied Miss Pilgrim.