being
minded to have a look at the speaker. The voice sounded as though it
must belong to a big man with a barrel-organ chest. I was surprised to
find that it didn't.

Its owner was sitting in a chair in the middle of a little space
cluttered up with discarded exchanges and galley proofs. He was rather a
small man, short but compact. He had his hat off and his hair, which was
thin but fine as silk floss, was combed back over his ears and sprayed
out behind in a sort of mane effect. It had been red hair once, but was
now so thickly streaked with white that it had become a faded brindle
color. I took notice of this first because his back was toward me; in a
second or two he turned his head sideways and I saw that he had exactly
the face to match the hair. It was a round, plump, elderly face, with a
short nose, delicately pink at the tip. The eyes were a pale blue, and
just under the lower lip, which protruded slightly, was a small gray-red
goatee, sticking straight out from a cleft in the chin like a dab of a
sandy sheep's wool. Also, as the speaker swung himself further round, I
took note of a shirt of plaited white linen billowing out over his chest
and ending at the top in a starchy yet rumply collar that rolled
majestically and Byronically clear up under his ears. Under the collar
was loosely knotted a black-silk tie such as sailors wear. His vest was
unbuttoned, all except the two lowermost buttons, and the sleeves of
his coat were turned back neatly off his wrists. This, though, could
not have been on account of the heat, because the weather wasn't very
hot yet. I learned later that, winter or summer, he always kept his coat
sleeves turned back and the upper buttons of his vest unfastened. His
hands were small and plump, and his feet were small too and daintily
shod in low, square-toed shoes. About the whole man there was an air
somehow of full-bloomed foppishness gone to tassel--as though having
been a dandy once, he was now merely neat and precise in his way of
dress.

He was talking along with the death of Albert Sidney Johnston for his
subject, not seeming to notice that his audience wasn't deeply
interested. He had, it seemed, a way of stating a proposition as a fact,
as an indisputable, everlasting, eternal fact, an immutable thing. It
became immutable through his way of stating it. Then he would frame it
in the form of a question and ask it. Then he would answer it himself
and go right ahead.

Boynton, th