Even at that she didn't consider him seriously, she looked for him and
missed him when he didn't appear solely because of a secret hope that some
day that other one would come back to meet him in the cafe.
Why she held fast to that hope Sofia could not have said.
Toward the middle of summer Mr. Karslake absented himself for several
weeks, and when he showed up again his visits were fewer and more widely
spaced.
On an afternoon late in August, a hot and weary day, he sauntered in with
his habitual air of having in particular nothing to do and all the time
there was to do it in, and found a man waiting for him.
This was a person whom Sofia had quite overlooked after one glance had
classified and pigeon-holed him. A single glance had been enough. They do
some things better in England; a man cast for any particular role in life,
for example, is apt to conform himself, mentally, physically, and even as
to his outer habiliments, so nicely to the mould that he is forever
unmistakably what he is even to the most casual observer. So this man was a
butler, he had been born and bred a butler, he lived by buttling, a butler
he would die; not a pompous, turkeycock butler, such as the American stage
will offer you when it takes up English fashionable life in a serious way,
but a mild-mannered, decent body, with plain side-whiskers, chopped short
on a line with the lobes of his ears, otherwise clean-shaven, his hair
pathetically dyed, a colourless cast of countenance, eyes meek and mild.
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