meeting at John's, to discuss the doings of the family of his brother
Morton Freeland--better known as Tod--he would perhaps look in on the
caricatures at the English Gallery, and visit one duchess in Mayfair,
concerning the George Richard Memorial. And so, not the soft felt hat
which really suited authorship, nor the black top hat which obliterated
personality to the point of pain, but this gray thing with narrowish
black band, very suitable, in truth, to a face of a pale buff color, to
a moustache of a deep buff color streaked with a few gray hairs, to a
black braided coat cut away from a buff-colored waistcoat, to his neat
boots--not patent leather--faintly buffed with May-day dust. Even his
eyes, Freeland gray, were a little buffed over by sedentary habit, and
the number of things that he was conscious of. For instance, that the
people passing him were distressingly plain, both men and women; plain
with the particular plainness of those quite unaware of it. It struck
him forcibly, while he went along, how very queer it was that with so
many plain people in the country, the population managed to keep up even
as well as it did. To his wonderfully keen sense of defect, it seemed
little short of marvellous. A shambling, shoddy crew, this crowd
of shoppers and labor demonstrators! A conglomeration of hopelessly
mediocre visages! What was to be done about it? Ah! what indeed!--since
they were evidently not aware of their own dismal mediocrity. Hardly
a beautiful or a vivid face, hardly a wicked one, never anything
transfigured, passionate, terrible, or grand. Nothing Greek, early
Italian, Elizabethan, not even beefy, beery, broad old Georgian.
Something clutched-in, and squashed-out about it all--on that collective
face something of the look of a man almost comfortably and warmly
wrapped round by a snake at the very beginning of its squeeze. It gave
Felix Freeland a sort of faint excitement and pleasure to notice this.
For it was his business to notice things, and embalm them afterward
in ink. And he believed that not many people noticed it, so that it