He wore a velvet jacket,
a grey waistcoat buttoning up to the throat, grey trousers,
fur-bordered slippers; his collar was very deep, and instead of the
ordinary shirt-cuffs, his wrists were enclosed in frills.
Long-haired, full-bearded, he had the forehead of an idealist and
eyes whose natural expression was an indulgent smile.
A man of letters, he had struggled from obscure poverty to success
and ample means; at three-and-thirty he was still hard pressed to
make both ends meet, but the ten subsequent years had built for him
this pleasant home and banished his long familiar anxieties to the
land of nightmare. 'It came just in time,' he was in the habit of
saying to those who had his confidence. 'I was at the point where a
man begins to turn sour, and I should have soured in earnest.' The
process had been most effectually arrested. People were occasionally
found to say that his books had a tang of acerbity; possibly this
was the safety-valve at work, a hint of what might have come had the
old hunger-demons kept up their goading. In the man himself you
discovered an extreme simplicity of feeling, a frank tenderness, a
noble indignation. For one who knew him it was not difficult to
understand that he should have taken up extreme social views, still
less that he should act upon his convictions.
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