Captain Broughton sat stiffly erect in the opposite corner of the carriage, with its musty aroma of essence-of-funerals—that indescribable blend of new black clothes and moth-balls and damp horsehair and smelling salts and faded flowers. His square hands, cramped into unaccustomed black kid gloves which already showed a white split across the knuckles, lay awkwardly, palms uppermost, on his knees. “Damn the things,” he said to himself for the fiftieth time, contemplating their empty finger-tips, sticking out flat as the ends of half-filled pea-pods, “why don’t they make ’em so that a man can get his hands into ’em?”

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