and he too, was hardly credible: the huge creature was at least six and a half feet tall, and he must have weighed three hundred pounds. He had a flaming moon of face and jowl, at once most animal and delicate, and he peered out keenly with luminous smoke-grey eyes beneath a bushy hedge-growth of grey brows. He was dressed in the clerical garb and his bulging grossly sensual calves were encased in buttoned gaiters. As Eugene went by, he was leaning forward with his little cup of muddy coffee held delicately in the huge mutton of his hand, peering keenly out beneath his beetling bush of brow. And what he said was this:
“Did you ever read—that is, in recent yöhs—the concluding chaptahs in’The Vicah of Wakefield’?” Carefully he set the little cup down in its saucer. “I was reading it just the other day. It’s an extraordinary thing!” he said.
It is impossible to reproduce the sound of these simple words, or the effect they wrought upon Eugene’s senses.
For, first, the words “Did you ever” were delivered in a delicate rising-and-falling neigh, the word “read” really came out with a long reedy sound, the words “that is, in recent yöhs,” in a parenthesis of sweetly gentle benevolence, the phrase “the concluding chaptahs in’The Vicah of Wakefield’” in full, deliberate, satisfied tones of titular respect, the phrase “I was reading it just the other day,” thoughtfully, reedily, with a subdued, gentle, and mellow reminiscence, and the final decisive phrase, “It’s an extraordinary thing,” with passionate conviction and sincerity that passed at the end into such an unction of worshipful admiration that the words “extraordinary thing” were not spoken but breathed out passionately, and had the sound “’strawd’n’ry thing!”
“Ow!” the young man answered distantly, and in a rather surprised tone, with an air of coldly startled interest, “Now! I can’t say that I have—not since my nursery days, at any rate!” He laughed metallically.
“You should read it again,” the mountainous creature breathed unctuously. “A ’strawd’n’ry thing! A ’strawd’n’ry thing.” Delicately he lifted the little cup of muddy black in his huge hand again and put it to his lips.
“But frightfully sentimental, down’t you think?” the girl neighed sharply at this point. “I mean all the lovely-woman-stoops-to-folly sawt of thing, you know. After all, it is a bit thick to expect people to swallow that nowadays,” she neighed, “particularly after all that’s happened in
