d him to be,
but courteous and even merry. In it he said he should feel honoured if
I would visit his poor abode, and he seemed to have read my books and
knew all about me, so with very mixed feelings Jimmie and I called at
the hour he named.

He lives in one of the regulation apartment houses of Paris, of the
meaner sort--by no means as fine as those in the American quarter. The
most horrible odour of German cookery--cauliflower and boiled cabbage
and vinegar and all that--floated out when the door opened. The room--a
sort of living-room--into which we were ushered was a mixture of all
sorts of furniture, black haircloth, dingy and old, with here and there
a good picture or one fine chair, which I imagined had been presented to
him.

Jimmie was much excited at the idea of meeting him. Max Nordau is one of
his idols,--Nordau's horrible power of invective fully meeting Jimmie's
ideas of the way crimes of the bestial sort should be treated. Jimmie is
often a surprise to me in his beliefs and ideals, but when Doctor Nordau
entered the room I forgot Jimmie and everything else in the world except
this one man.

I can see him now as he stood before me--a thick-set man with a
magnificent torso, but with legs which ought to have been longer. For
that body he ought to have been six feet tall. When he is seated he
appears to be a very large man. You would know that he was a physician
from the way he shakes hands--even from the touch of his hand, which
seems to be in itself a soothing of pain.

He was exquisitely clean. Indeed he seemed, after one look into his
face, to be one of the cleanest men I ever had seen. And to look into
the face of a man in Paris and to be able to say that, _means_
something.

His eyes were gray blue--very clear in colour. Their whites were really
white--not bloodshot nor yellow. His skin was the clear, beautiful
colour which you sometimes see in a young and handsome Jew. There was
the same clear red and white. This distinguishing quality of clearness
was noticeable too in his lips, for his short white moustache shows them
to be full, very red, and with the line where the red joins the white
extremely clear cut. His teeth were large, full, even, and white, like
those of a primitive man, who tore his rare meat with those same white
teeth, and who never heard of a dentist. His hair was short, white, and
bristling. He seemed to have some Jewish blood in him, but he seemed
more than all to be perfectl