His impatience made the hour and
a half seem interminable.
The fever which was upon him had increased. He coughed
frequently; his breathing was difficult; though constantly
moving, he felt as if, in the absence of excitement, his one wish
would have been to lie down and abandon himself to lethargy. Two
men who sat with him in the third-class carriage had spread a rug
over their knees and amused themselves with playing cards for
trifling sums of money; the sight of their foolish faces, the
sound of their laughs, the talk they interchanged, exasperated
him to the last point of endurance; but for all that he could not
draw his attention from them. He seemed condemned by some
spiritual tormentor to take an interest in their endless games,
and to observe their visages until he knew every line with a
hateful intimacy. One of the men had a moustache of unusual form;
the ends curved upward with peculiar suddenness, and Reardon was
constrained to speculate as to the mode of training by which this
singularity had been produced. He could have shed tears of
nervous distraction in his inability to turn his thoughts upon
other things.
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