a volume of Chaucer or Shelley from that
rank, its absence irritated the mind like a gap in a man's front teeth.
One could not say the books were never read; probably they were, but
there was a sense of their being chained to their places, like the
Bibles in the old churches. Dr Hood treated his private book-shelf as
if it were a public library. And if this strict scientific intangibility
steeped even the shelves laden with lyrics and ballads and the tables
laden with drink and tobacco, it goes without saying that yet more
of such heathen holiness protected the other shelves that held the
specialist's library, and the other tables that sustained the frail and
even fairylike instruments of chemistry or mechanics.

Dr Hood paced the length of his string of apartments, bounded--as the
boys' geographies say--on the east by the North Sea and on the west by
the serried ranks of his sociological and criminologist library. He was
clad in an artist's velvet, but with none of an artist's negligence; his
hair was heavily shot with grey, but growing thick and healthy; his face
was lean, but sanguine and expectant. Everything about him and his room
indicated something at once rigid and restless, like that great northern
sea by which (on pure principles of hygiene) he had built his home.

Fate, being in a funny mood, pushed the door open and introduced into
those long, strict, sea-flanked apartments one who was perhaps the most
startling opposite of them and their master. In answer to a curt but
civil summons, the door opened inwards and there shambled into the room
a shapeless little figure, which seemed to find its own hat and umbrella
as unmanageable as a mass of luggage. The umbrella was a black and
prosaic bundle long past repair; the hat was a broad-curved black hat,
clerical but not common in England; the man was the very embodiment of
all that is homely and helpless.

The doctor regarded the new-comer with a restrained astonishment, not
unlike that he would have shown if some huge but obviously harmless
sea-beast had crawled into his room. The new-comer regarded the doctor
with that beaming but breathless geniality which characterizes a
corpulent charwoman who has just managed to stuff herself into an
omnibus. It is a rich confusion of social self-congratulation and bodily
disarray. His hat tumbled to the carpet, his heavy umbrella slipped
between his knees with a thud; he reached after the one and ducked
after the other, b