Page:The Ivory Tower (London, W. Collins Sons & Co., 1917).djvu/183

THE IVORY TOWER or betwixt and between? Is he little or big or neither one thing or t'other? Is he fat or thin or of 'medium weight'? There are always such lots to be told about people, and never a creature in all the wide world to tell. Even Mr. Northover, when I come to think of it, never mentioned his size."

"Well, you wouldn't mention it," Horton amiably argued. The appeal, he showed withal, stirred him to certain recoveries. "And I should call him black—black as to his straight thick hair, which I see rather distinctively 'slick' and soigné—the hair of a good little boy who never played at things that got it tumbled. No, he's only very middling tall; in fact so very middling," Haughty made out, "that it probably comes to his being rather short. But he has neither a hump nor a limp, no marked physical deformity of any sort; has in fact a kind of futile fidgetty quickness which suggests the little man, and the nervous and the active and the ready; the ready, I mean, for anything in the way of interest and talk—given that the matter isn't too big for him. The 'active', I say, though at the same time," he noted, "I ask myself what the deuce the activity will have been about."

The girl took in these impressions to the effect of desiring still more of them. "Doesn't he happen then to have eyes and things?"

"Oh yes"—Horton bethought himself—"lots 169