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One was a cheap portrait of the girl we had been with that afternoon, Mary Drower. She was obviously wearing her best clothes and had the self-conscious, wooden smile on her face that so often disfigures the expression in posed photography, and makes a snapshot preferable.
You yourself are English and yet you do not seem to appreciate the quality of the English reaction to a direct question. It is invariably one of suspicion and the natural result is reticence. If I had asked those people for information they would have shut up like oysters. But by making a statement (and a somewhat out of the way and preposterous one) and by your contradiction of it, tongues are immediately loosened.
“You are determined to accompany the expedition, Hastings?” “Oh, yes. I shouldn’t be happy staying here inactive.” “There is activity of mind as well as body, Hastings.” “Well, you’re better at it than I am,” I said. “You are incontestably right, Hastings.
Speech, so a wise old Frenchman said to me once, is an invention of man’s to prevent him from thinking.