ask Mr Tanner to be good enough to step down here. [The parlormaid goes
out; and Ramsden returns to the fireplace, as to a fortified position].
I must say that of all the confounded pieces of impertinence--well, if
these are Anarchist manners I hope you like them. And Annie with him!
Annie! A-- [he chokes].

OCTAVIUS. Yes: that's what surprises me. He's so desperately afraid of
Ann. There must be something the matter.

Mr John Tanner suddenly opens the door and enters. He is too young to be
described simply as a big man with a beard. But it is already plain that
middle life will find him in that category. He has still some of the
slimness of youth; but youthfulness is not the effect he aims at: his
frock coat would befit a prime minister; and a certain high chested
carriage of the shoulders, a lofty pose of the head, and the Olympian
majesty with which a mane, or rather a huge wisp, of hazel colored
hair is thrown back from an imposing brow, suggest Jupiter rather than
Apollo. He is prodigiously fluent of speech, restless, excitable (mark
the snorting nostril and the restless blue eye, just the thirty-secondth
of an inch too wide open), possibly a little mad. He is carefully
dressed, not from the vanity that cannot resist finery, but from a sense
of the importance of everything he does which leads him to make as
much of paying a call as other men do of getting married or laying a
foundation stone. A sensitive, susceptible, exaggerative, earnest man: a
megalomaniac, who would be lost without a sense of humor.

Just at present the sense of humor is in abeyance. To say that he is
excited is nothing: all his moods are phases of excitement. He is now in
the panic-stricken phase; and he walks straight up to Ramsden as if with
the fixed intention of shooting him on his own hearthrug. But what he