room. "I am ashamed of a grown man that can cry at a picture, and can't
tell the reason why."

After a few more turns he resumed his easy-chair and his tumbler, and,
looking upward, beckoned to his pet spider, which came dangling
downward, great parti-colored monster that he was, and swung about his
master's head in hideous conference as it seemed; a sight that so
distressed the schoolmaster, or shocked his delicate taste, that he
went out, and called the two children to take a walk with him, with the
purpose of breathing air that was neither infected with spiders nor
graves.

After his departure, Doctor Grimshawe seemed even more disturbed than
during his presence: again he strode about the study; then sat down
with his hands on his knees, looking straight into the fire, as if it
imaged the seething element of his inner man, where burned hot
projects, smoke, heat, blackness, ashes, a smouldering of old thoughts,
a blazing up of new; casting in the gold of his mind, as Aaron did that
of the Israelites, and waiting to see what sort of a thing would come
out of the furnace. The children coming in from their play, he spoke
harshly to them, and eyed little Ned with a sort of savageness, as if
he meant to eat him up, or do some other dreadful deed: and when little
Elsie came with her usual frankness to his knee, he repelled her in
such a way that she shook her little hand at him, saying, "Naughty
Doctor Grim, what has come to you?"

Through all that day, by some subtle means or other, the whole
household knew that something was amiss; and nobody in it was
comfortable. It was like a spell of weather; like the east wind; like
an epidemic in the air, that would not let anything be comfortable or