the last his movements remained quick and sudden, his short firm legs,
as he walked, seemed to twinkle rather than display the scissors-stride
of common humanity, and he never seemed to have knees, but instead, a
dispersed flexibility of limb.

There was, I seem to remember, a secular intensification of his
features; his nose developed character, became aggressive, stuck out at
the world more and more; the obliquity of his mouth, I think, increased.
From the face that returns to my memory projects a long cigar that is
sometimes cocked jauntily up from the higher corner, that sometimes
droops from the lower;--it was as eloquent as a dog's tail, and he
removed it only for the more emphatic modes of speech. He assumed a
broad black ribbon for his glasses, and wore them more and more askew as
time went on. His hair seemed to stiffen with success, but towards the
climax it thinned greatly over the crown, and he brushed it hard back
over his ears where, however, it stuck out fiercely. It always stuck out
fiercely over his forehead, up and forward.

He adopted an urban style of dressing with the onset of Tono-Bungay and
rarely abandoned it. He preferred silk hats with ample rich brims, often
a trifle large for him by modern ideas, and he wore them at various
angles to his axis; his taste in trouserings was towards fairly emphatic
stripes and his trouser cut was neat; he liked his frock-coat long and
full, although that seemed to shorten him. He displayed a number of
valuable rings, and I remember one upon his left little finger with a
large red stone bearing Gnostic symbols. "Clever chaps, those Gnostics,
George," he told me. "Means a lot. Lucky!" He never had any but a black
mohair watch-chair. In the country he affected grey and a large
grey cloth top-hat, except when motoring; then he would have a brown
deer-stalker cap and a fur suit of esquimaux cut with a sort of boot-end
to the trousers. Of an evening he would wear white waistcoats and plain
gold studs. He hated diamonds. "Flashy," he said they were. "Might as
well wear--an income tax-receipt. All very well for Park Lane. Unsold
stock. Not my style. Sober financier, George."

So much for his visible presence. For a time it was very familiar to
the world, for at the crest of the boom he allowed quite a number
of photographs and at least one pencil sketch to be published in the
sixpenny papers.

His voice declined during those years from his early tenor to a flat
rich