A
young Austrian, yellow as gold, and a livid South-American, were of a
lasting fascination to March.
What most troubled him, in his scrutiny of the crowd, was the difficulty
of assigning people to their respective nations, and he accused his years
of having dulled his perceptions; but perhaps it was from their long
disuse in his homogeneous American world. The Americans themselves fused
with the European races who were often so hard to make out; his
fellow-citizens would not be identified till their bad voices gave them
away; he thought the women's voices the worst.
At the springs, a line of young girls with a steady mechanical action
dipped the cups into the steaming source, and passed them impersonally up
to their owners. With the patients at the Muhlbrunn it was often a
half-hour before one's turn came, and at all a strict etiquette forbade
any attempt to anticipate it. The water was merely warm and flat, and
after the first repulsion one could forget it. March formed a childish
habit of counting ten between the sips, and of finishing the cup with a
gulp which ended it quickly; he varied his walks between cups by going
sometimes to a bridge at the end of the colonnade where a group of
Triestines were talking Venetian, and sometimes to the little Park beyond
the Kurhaus, where some old women were sweeping up from the close sward
the yellow leaves which the trees had untidily dropped overnight.
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