touched with the suggestions of great latent power, with reserves of passion, eloquence, and resonant sonority.
His head was really splendid; he had a strong but kindly-looking face touched keenly, quietly by humour; his eyes, beneath his glasses, were also keen, observant, sharply humorous; his mouth was wide and humorous but somewhat too tight, thin and spinsterly for a man’s; his nose was large and strong; his forehead shapely and able-looking, and he had neat wings of hair cut short and sparse and lying flat against the skull.
He wore eye-glasses of the pince-nez variety, and they dangled in a fashionable manner from a black silk cord: it was better than going to a show to see him put them on, his manner was so urbane, casual, and distinguished when he did so. His humour, although suave, was also quick and rich and gave an engaging warmth and humanity to a personality that sometimes needed them. Even in his display of humour, however, he never lost his urbane distinguished manner—for example, when someone told him that one of his women students had referred to another woman in the course, an immensely tall angular creature who dressed in rusty brown right up to the ears, as “the queen of the angleworms,” Professor Hatcher shook all over with sudden laughter, removed his glasses with a distinguished movement, and then in a rich but controlled voice remarked:
“Ah, she has a very pretty wit. A very pretty wit indeed!”
Thus, even in his agreeable uses of the rich, subtle and immensely pleasant humour with which he had been gifted, Professor Hatcher was something of an actor. He was one of those rare people who really “chuckle,” and although there was no doubting the spontaneity and naturalness of his chuckle, it is also probably true that Professor Hatcher somewhat fancied himself as a chuckler.
The Hatcherian chuckle was just exactly what the word connotes: a movement of spontaneous mirth that shook his stocky shoulders and strong well-set torso with a sudden hearty tremor. And although he could utter rich and sonorous throat-sounds indicative of hearty mirth while this chuckling process was going on, an even more characteristic form was completely soundless, the tight lips firmly compressed, the edges turned up with the convulsive inclination to strong laughter, the fine distinguished head thrown back, while all the rest of him, throat, shoulders, torso, belly, arms—the whole man—shook in the silent tremors of the chuckle.
