Jellicoe
disappeared through the doorway at the end of the room, "or perhaps I
should say, a strange being, for I can hardly think of him as a man. I
have never met any other human creature at all like him."
"He is certainly a queer old fogey," I agreed.
"Yes, but there is something more than that. He is so emotionless, so
remote and aloof from all mundane concerns. He moves among ordinary men
and women, but as a mere presence, an unmoved spectator of their
actions, quite dispassionate and impersonal."
"Yes, he is astonishingly self-contained; in fact, he seems, as you say,
to go to and fro among men, enveloped in a sort of infernal atmosphere
of his own, like Marley's ghost. But he is lively and human enough as
soon as the subject of Egyptian antiquities is broached."
"Lively, but not human. He is always, to me, quite unhuman. Even when he
is most interested, and even enthusiastic, he is a mere personification
of knowledge. Nature ought to have furnished him with an ibis' head like
Tahuti; then he would have looked his part.
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