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It was possible that Andreas Krige was a man of many ideas; he was not a man of many words. For the better part of an hour Matheson sat on the stoep and smoked in company with him, and waited in confident expectancy for the remark which, he calculated roughly, fell on an average once in every fifteen minutes from Krige's lips. The remark, when it came, was not profound. His own conversational efforts partook of the nature of a monologue, which Krige punctuated at long intervals with grunts; a short grunt fitting like a comma into a pause, and a longer grunt putting a period to the talk. He emerged from these periods usually with one of his infrequent observations.
It occurred to Matheson later, thinking over that quiet hour on the stoep, that Krige, by his silence and those occasional sympathetic grunts, had deliberately encouraged him to talk, had indeed urged him on to talk while observing himself an intentional reticence. But this did not strike him at the time, perhaps because his mind was so intent on Honor Krige, whom he could hear moving about inside the room they had left by means of the long window near which their chairs were placed, that it held no space for other reflection.