The worst of that question moreover was that he knew it as a symptom the sense of which annoyed him.

"If I'm going to be odiously conscious of how I may strike the fellow," he reflected, "it was so little what I came out for that I may as well stop before I begin." This sage consideration too, distinctly, seemed to leave untouched the fact that he WAS going to be conscious.

He was conscious of everything but of what would have served him.
He was to know afterwards, in the watches of the night, that nothing would have been more open to him than after a minute or two to propose to Chad to seek with him the refuge of the lobby.

He hadn't only not proposed it, but had lacked even the presence of mind to see it as possible.

He had stuck there like a schoolboy wishing not to miss a minute of the show; though for that portion of the show then presented he hadn't had an instant's real attention.