"Well, you can
comfort yourself with the notion that you'll be coming again.
The mountains'll stay here, all right," he assured her.
The young people smiled back at him, and with this he
rearranged his feet in a new posture on the opposite seat,
lighted another cigar, and pillowed his head once more
against the hard, red-plush cushion. Personally, he did
not in the least resent the failure of the scenery.
For something more than three months, this purposeless
pleasure-tour had been dragging him about from point
to point, sleeping in strange beds, eating extraordinarily
strange food, transacting the affairs of a sight-seer among
people who spoke strange languages, until he was surfeited
with the unusual. It had all been extremely interesting,
of course, and deeply improving--but he was getting
tired of talking to nobody but waiters, and still more
so of having nothing to do which he could not as well
leave undone if he chose. After a few days more of
Switzerland--for they had already gazed with blank faces
at this universal curtain of mist from such different points
of view as Lucerne, Interlaken, and Thun--it was clear
to him that they would, as he phrased it, to himself,
make a break for home. Unless, indeed, something happened
at Montreux. Ah, would anything happen at Montreux?
For four days his mind had been automatically reverting
to that question; it lurked continually in the background
of his thoughts, now, as he smoked and idly ruminated,
on his way southward through the fog.
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