He would have returned from ten years at the North Pole
or at the Equator, with savages or with uncompromising intellectuals,
just the same Julian. He was one of those beings who are violently
themselves all the time. By some characteristic social clumsiness
he had omitted to remove his overcoat in the lobby. And now, in
the parlour, he could not get it off. As a man seated, engaged in
conversation by a woman standing, forgets to rise at once and then
cannot rise, finding himself glued to the chair, so was Julian with
his overcoat; to take it off he would have had to flay himself alive.
"Won't you take off your overcoat?" Louis suggested.
"No."
With his instinctive politeness Louis turned to improve the fire.
And as he poked among the coals he said, in the way of amiable
conversation--
"How's South Africa?"
"All right," replied Julian, who hated to impart his sensations. If
Julian had witnessed Napoleon's retreat from Moscow he would have come
to the Five Towns and, if questioned--not otherwise--would have said
that it was all right.
Louis, however, suspected that his brevity was due to Julian's
resentment of any inquisitiveness concerning his doings in South
Africa; and he therefore at once abandoned South Africa as a subject
of talk, though he was rather curious to know what, indeed, Julian had
been about in South Africa for six mortal months.
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