the more often you met Sir Wilson Seymour. He was the one intelligent man
on twenty unintelligent committees--on every sort of subject,
from the reform of the Royal Academy to the project of bimetallism
for Greater Britain. In the Arts especially he was omnipotent.
He was so unique that nobody could quite decide whether he was
a great aristocrat who had taken up Art, or a great artist whom
the aristocrats had taken up. But you could not meet him for five minutes
without realizing that you had really been ruled by him all your life.

His appearance was "distinguished" in exactly the same sense;
it was at once conventional and unique. Fashion could have found no fault
with his high silk hat--, yet it was unlike anyone else's hat--
a little higher, perhaps, and adding something to his natural height.
His tall, slender figure had a slight stoop yet it looked
the reverse of feeble. His hair was silver-grey, but he did not look old;
it was worn longer than the common yet he did not look effeminate;
it was curly but it did not look curled. His carefully pointed beard
made him look more manly and militant than otherwise, as it does in those
old admirals of Velazquez with whose dark portraits his house was hung.
His grey gloves were a shade bluer, his silver-knobbed cane a shade longer
than scores of such gloves and canes flapped and flourished about
the theatres and the restaurants.

The other man was not so tall, yet would have struck nobody as short,
but merely as strong and handsome. His hair also was curly,
but fair and cropped close to a strong, massive head--the sort of head
you break a door with, as Chaucer said of the Miller's.
His military moustache and the carriage of his shoulders
showed him a soldier, but he had a pair of those peculiar frank
and piercing blue eyes which are more common in sailors.