Page:The Plutocrat (1927).pdf/287

 "Ah—well, yes," he said, but with no very firm conviction.

In truth, this drive was beginning to seem almost a little too adventurous. He was no mountaineer; he had never liked to look from the upper windows of a skyscraper; and the height and depth of the gigantic, ragged world about him now offered him a new experience, of which he was far from sure that he wished to take advantage. He had no desire to look down again over the unprotected, sheer edge of the road, and began to understand that his companion's warning at Tizi-Ouzou might have been not wholly a bantering one.

He was not timid; but he was a townsman; worse than that, a literary and theatrical townsman, spending most of his life writing in a secluded room, or, when his work was in the theatre, advising actual people how to speak and move like the fancied people he imagined principally out of his reading. Of course he thought he imagined them out of "life"; and, with the aid of what he read, he did study the people about him; but nearly all of these had been bookish or theatrical, or both—not perceptibly resembling the undomesticated-looking Kabyle tribesmen now