r--had been
pawned for some weeks, since, in fact, the June quarter day. But
my mind was full of hypothetical opportunities.

As I came up the steps to our door, I remarked that Mr. Gabbitas
looked at me suddenly round his dull red curtains with a sort of
alarmed resolution in his eye and vanished, and as I walked along
the passage he opened his door upon me suddenly and intercepted
me.

You are figuring me, I hope, as a dark and sullen lout in shabby,
cheap, old-world clothes that are shiny at all the wearing surfaces,
and with a discolored red tie and frayed linen. My left hand keeps
in my pocket as though there is something it prefers to keep a grip
upon there. Mr. Gabbitas was shorter than I, and the first note
he struck in the impression he made upon any one was of something
bright and birdlike. I think he wanted to be birdlike, he possessed
the possibility of an avian charm, but, as a matter of fact, there
was nothing of the glowing vitality of the bird in his being. And
a bird is never out of breath and with an open mouth. He was in
the clerical dress of that time, that costume that seems now almost
the strangest of all our old-world clothing, and he presented it in
its cheapest form--black of a poor texture, ill-fitting, strangely
cut. Its long skirts accentuated the tubbiness of his body, the
shortness of his legs. The white tie below his all-round collar,
beneath his innocent large-spectacled face, was a little grubby,
and between his not very clean teeth he held a briar pipe. His
complexion was whitish, and although he was only thirty-three or
four perhaps, his sandy hair was already thinning from the top of
his head.

To your eye, now, he would seem the strangest figure, in the utter
disregard of all physical beauty or dignity about him. You would
find him extraordinarily odd, but in the old days he met not only
with acceptance but respect. He was alive until within a year or so
ago, but his later appearance changed. As I saw him that afternoon
he was a very slovenly, ungainly little human being indeed, not only
was his clothing altogether ugly and queer, but had you stripped
the man stark, you would certainly have seen in the bulging paunch
that comes from flabby muscles and flabbily controlled appetites,
and in the rounded shoulders and flawed and yellowish skin, the same
failure of any effort toward clean beauty. You had an instinctive
sense that so he had been from the beginning. You felt he was not