stood always on this table of luxury; but the fanciful have asserted
that the whisky, brandy, and rum seemed always to stand at the same level.
Poetry was there: the left-hand corner of the room was lined with
as complete a set of English classics as the right hand could show
of English and foreign physiologists. But if one took 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.