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220 gloomy silence. He roamed about continually, with his hands in his pockets and his hair in a tangle; he could take neither a decision nor a momentary rest. It struck Waterlow more than ever before that he was after all essentially a foreigner; he had the sensibility of one, the sentimental candour, the need for sympathy, the communicative despair. A real young Anglo-Saxon would have buttoned himself up in his embarrassment and been dry and awkward and capable and unconscious of a drama; but Gaston was effusive and appealing and ridiculous and graceful—natural, above all, and egotistical. Indeed, a real young Anglo-Saxon would not have had this particular embarrassment at all for he would not have parted to such an extent with his moral independence. It was this weakness that excited Waterlow's secret scorn: family feeling was all very well, but to see it erected into a superstition affected him very much in the same way as the image of a blackamoor upon his knees before a fetish. He now measured for the first time the root it had taken in Gaston's nature. To act like a man the poor fellow must pull up the root, but the operation was terribly painful—was attended with cries and tears and contortions, with baffling scruples and a sense of sacrilege, the sense of siding with strangers against his own flesh and blood. Every now and then he broke out—"And if you see her—as she