you keep your mind occupied all the time with all these deep and beautiful thoughts you have! I don’t see how you do it! I should think you’d get yourself all tired out just by the thinking that you do.”
“Tired, my dear?” said Doctor Thornton sonorously, bestowing upon her worshipper a smile of tolerant benevolence. “How can anyone grow tired who lives and moves and breathes in this great world of ours? No, no, my dear, do not say tired. Rather say refreshed, rejuvenated, and inspired by the glorious pageant that life offers us in its unending beauty and profusion. Wherever I look,” she continued, looking, “I see nothing but order and harmony in the universe. I lift my eyes unto the stars.” she said majestically, at the same time lifting her face in a movement of rapturous contemplation toward the ceiling of the hotel lobby, “and feast my soul upon the infinite beauties of God’s heaven, the glorious proportion of the sidereal universe. I turn my gaze around me, and everywhere I look I see the noble works that man has fashioned, the unceasing progress he has made in his march upward from the brute, the noble aspiration of his spirit, the eternal labour of his mighty intellect towards a higher purpose, the radiant beauty of his countenance in which all the highest ardours of his soul may be discerned!”
And as she pronounced this sonorous eulogy her glance rested benevolently on old Doctor Withers’soured and wizened features. He lowered his head coyly, as becomes a modest man, and in a moment the rhapsodist continued:
“’What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form, in moving, how express and admirable! In action, how like an angel! In apprehension, how like a God!’”
And having sonorously pronounced Hamlet’s mighty judgment, the wonderful old woman, who had herself for thirty years been one of the most prosperous abortionists in the nation, looked benevolently about her at all the specimens of God’s choice article who were assembled in the lobby.
Over behind the cigar counter the vendor, a fat Czechish youth with a pale flabby face and dull taffy-coloured hair, was industriously engaged in picking his fat nose with a greasy thumb and forefinger. Elsewhere, in another corner of the lobby, three permanent denizens of the Leopold, familiarly and privately known to members of the hotel staff as Crab-face Willy, Maggie the Dope, and Greasy Gertie, were sitting where they always sat, in an unspeaking and unsmiling silence.
