Page:Eliot - Felix Holt, the Radical, vol. I, 1866.djvu/117

Rh am not a mouse to have a nose that takes note of wax or tallow."

The loud abrupt tones made the old man vibrate a little. He had been stroking his chin gently before, with a sense that he must be very quiet and deliberate in his treatment of the eccentric young man; but now, quite unreflectingly, he drew forth a pair of spectacles, which he was in the habit of using when he wanted to observe his interlocutor more closely than usual.

"And I myself, in fact, am equally indifferent," he said, as he opened and adjusted his glasses, "so that I have a sufficient light on my book." Here his large eyes looked discerningly through the spectacles.

"'Tis the quality of the page you care about, not of the candle," said Felix, smiling pleasantly enough at his inspector. "You're thinking that you have a roughly-written page before you now."

That was true. The minister, accustomed to the respectable air of provincial townsmen, and especially to the sleek well-clipped gravity of his own male congregation, felt a slight shock as his glasses made perfectly clear to him the shaggy-headed, large-eyed, strong-limbed person of this questionable young man, without waistcoat or cravat. But