During his long rest on the Embankment bench he had not read a newspaper nor smoked a cigarette. He had just sat and stared at the river, quite heedless of those who passed or of those who came to sit beside him for a few impatient minutes before jumping up and hurrying away. Boris had learned the futility of haste, that exposure of bad timing. He had been forced by circumstances to scrape his life clean of everything but the bare essentials of existence. He was prepared, moreover, to accept a varying quality in these things, from a minimum just consistent with upholding life to a reasonable, if precarious, degree of comfort and at times, as now, to a temporary opulence. He made no future plans as he sat there. Planning in advance, mapping out a future progression, were habits of behaviour, like haste, that he had long ago given up. Not that he allowed himself to drift into totally unprepared actions, unforeseen situations. On the contrary.
