whom he
felt would see eye to eye with him on this question. "He doesn't approve
of caresses," she added.

"Well, who wants to caress him?" Jan asked bluntly.

Meg declared there was one thing she could not bear about Mr. Withells,
and that was the way he shook hands, "exactly as if he had no thumbs. If
he's so afraid of touching one as all that comes to, why doesn't he let
it alone?"

Yet the apparently thumbless hands were constantly occupied in bearing
gifts of all kinds to his friends.

In appearance he was dapper, smallish, without being undersized, always
immaculately neat in his attire, with a clean-shaven, serious, rather
sallow face, which was inclined to be chubby as to the cheeks. He wore
double-sighted pince-nez, and no mortal had ever seen him without them.
His favourite writer was Miss Jane Austen, and he deplored the
licentious tendency of so much modern literature; frequently, and with
flushed countenance, denouncing certain books as an "outrage." He was
considered a very well-read man. He disliked anything that was "not
quite nice," and detested a strong light, whether it were thrown upon
life or landscape; in bright sunshine he always carried a white umbrella
lined with green. The game he played best was croquet, and here he was
really first class; but he was also skilled in every known form of
Patience, and played each evening unless he happened to be dining out.

As regards food he was something of a faddist, and on the subject of
fresh air almost a monomaniac. He declared that he could not exist for
ten minutes in a room with closed windows, and that the smell of apples
made him feel positively faint; moreover, he would mention his somewhat
numerous antipathies as though there were something peculiarly
meritorious in possessing so many. This made his entertainment at any
meal a matter of agitated consideration among the ladies of Amber
Guiting.

Nevertheless, he kept an excellent and hospitable table himself, and in
no way forced his own taste upon others. He disliked the smell of
tobacco and hardly ever drank wine, yet he kept a stock of excellent
cigars and his cellar was beyond reproach.

He had been observing Jan for several years, and was rapidly coming to
the conclusion that she was an "eminently sensible woman." Her grey hair
and the way she had managed everything for her father led him to believe
that she was many years older than her real age. Recently he had taken
to come to Wren