CHAPTER 4It was not until the fourth or fifth day that Mr. Pinkerton ventured so far as to bring along a snack. The idea of eating at noon seated on one of the benches along the wall on the porch, behind the strange, misshapen figures placed now and then between the pillars, appealed to him strongly. It gave him a definite sense of being part of it. And sitting there in the pale late winter sun also gave him a certain paradoxical pleasure. The tall fluted columns, smoke and pigeon stained, made him feel appallingly small and insignificant, but the other people who sat there nibbling at their lunches, keeping an alert eye on the pigeons waddling about like predatory dowagers, were so depressingly drab and harassed-looking that he had a mild sense of adequacy that he did not normally feel in
