Fontenette had said, and I naturally used her
husband, who was thirty-one, for the comparison. Why, this man? It would
have been a laughable flattery to have guessed his age to be forty-five.
Yet that was really the fact. Many a man looks younger at sixty--oh, at
sixty-five! He was dark, bloodless, bowed, thin, weatherbeaten, ill-clad--
a picture of decent, incurable penury. The best thing about his was his
head. It was not imposing at all, but it was interesting, albeit very
meagrely graced with fine brown hair, dry and neglected. I read him
through without an effort before we had been ten minutes together; a leaf
still hanging to humanity's tree, but faded and shrivelled around some
small worm that was feeding on its juices.
And there was no mistaking that worm; it was the avarice of knowledge. He
had lost life by making knowledge its ultimate end, and was still delving
on, with never a laugh and never a cheer, feeding his emaciated heart on
the locusts and wild honey of entomology and botany, satisfied with them
for their own sake, without reference to God or man; an infant in
emotions, who time and again would no doubt have starved outright but for
his wife, whom there and then I resolved we should know also.
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