At first every one stared aghast ("stared aghast!"--how
is that for literary form?); but when Clovelly gurgled, and then
haw-hawed till he couldn't lift his champagne, the rest of us
followed in a double-quick. And the bookmaker simply sat calm and
earnest with his eye-glass in his eye, and never did more than
gently smile. "See here," he said ever so candidly of Clovelly's
best character, a serious, inscrutable kind of a man, the dignified
figure in the book--"I liked the way you drew that muff. He was
such an awful outsider, wasn't he? All talk, and hypocrite down to
his heels. And when you married him to that lady who nibbled her
food in public and gorged in the back pantry, and went 'slumming'
and made shoulder-strings for the parson--oh, I know the kind!"--
[This was Clovelly's heroine, whom he had tried to draw, as he said
himself, "with a perfect sincerity and a lovely worldly-mindedness,
and a sweet creation altogether."] "I said, that's poetic justice,
that's the refinement of retribution. Any other yarn-spinner would
have killed the male idiot by murder, or a drop from a precipice, or
a lingering fever; but Clovelly did the thing with delicate torture.
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