He set out at two o’clock from Victoria Terrace, and walked to the Grand Hotel. He dressed carefully, always in the same clothes—a black, broadcloth frock-coat, black trousers, concertinaed at the ankles over highly polished, high-heeled black boots, a carefully folded umbrella, a glistening silk top-hat, a little fence of miniature medals. His white beard, and his white hair surrounded his sallow, unsmiling face, like the copious flare of a halo. He was a tiny personage, and carried himself stiffly erect, full of a dignity at once self-important and threatening. His lips were thin; his eyes, under their snowy ledges, have been called, finely, “fierce badger eyes.” Cartoonists found him easy to “take”; their images proliferated, all recognisable projections, all the same, all different. He knew he was looked at. He had constructed himself to be looked at. Famous men walk behind, or inside, a simplified mask, constructed from inside and outside simultaneously. He groomed his parchment skin and his sleek boot-leather to turn back the light to the onlooker.
