looking, neuralgic, clean-shaven
man of fifty-three, with a hard mouth, a sharp nose, iron-gray hair,
gray eyes, gold-framed glasses, and a small, circular baldness at the
crown of his head. His name was Peter. He had had five children at
irregular intervals, of whom Ann Veronica was the youngest, so that as
a parent he came to her perhaps a little practised and jaded and
inattentive; and he called her his "little Vee," and patted her
unexpectedly and disconcertingly, and treated her promiscuously as of
any age between eleven and eight-and-twenty. The City worried him a good
deal, and what energy he had left over he spent partly in golf, a game
he treated very seriously, and partly in the practices of microscopic
petrography.

He "went in" for microscopy in the unphilosophical Victorian manner as
his "hobby." A birthday present of a microscope had turned his mind to
technical microscopy when he was eighteen, and a chance friendship with
a Holborn microscope dealer had confirmed that bent. He had remarkably
skilful fingers and a love of detailed processes, and he had become one
of the most dexterous amateur makers of rock sections in the world.
He spent a good deal more money and time than he could afford upon the
little room at the top of the house, in producing new lapidary apparatus
and new microscopic accessories and in rubbing down slices of rock to
a transparent thinness and mounting them in a beautiful and dignified
manner. He did it, he said, "to distract his mind." His chief successes
he exhibited to the Lowndean Microscopical Society, where their high
technical merit never failed to excite admiration. Their scientific
value was less considerable, since he chose rocks entirely with a
view to their difficulty of handling or their attractiveness at
conversaziones when done. He had a great contempt for the sections the
"theorizers" produced. They proved all sorts of things perhaps, but they
were thick, unequal, pitiful pieces of work. Yet an indiscriminating,
wrong-headed world gave such fellows all sorts of distinctions....

He read but little, and that chiefly healthy light fiction with
chromatic titles, The Red Sword, The Black Helmet, The Purple Robe, also
in order "to distract his mind." He read it in winter in the evening
after dinner, and Ann Veronica associated it with a tendency to
monopolize the lamp, and to spread a very worn pair of dappled fawn-skin
slippers across the fender. She wondered occasionall