altogether to misrepresent the process owing to which, having
dreamed of lamb and spinach and a salade de saison, I sat down in
penitence to a mutton-chop and a rice pudding. Bracing my feet
against the cross-beam of my little oaken table, I opposed to the
mahogany partition behind me the vigorous dorsal resistance that
must have expressed the old-English idea of repose. The sturdy
screen refused even to creak, but my poor Yankee joints made up
the deficiency.

While I was waiting there for my chop there came into the room a
person whom, after I had looked at him a moment, I supposed to be
a fellow lodger and probably the only one. He seemed, like
myself, to have submitted to proposals for dinner; the table on
the other side of my partition had been prepared to receive him.
He walked up to the fire, exposed his back to it and, after
consulting his watch, looked directly out of the window and
indirectly at me. He was a man of something less than middle age
and more than middle stature, though indeed you would have called
him neither young nor tall. He was chiefly remarkable for his
emphasised leanness. His hair, very thin on the summit of his
head, was dark short and fine. His eye was of a pale turbid grey,
unsuited, perhaps, to his dark hair and well-drawn brows, but not
altogether out of harmony with his colourless bilious complexion.
His nose was aquiline and delicate; beneath it his moustache
languished much rather than bristled. His mouth and chin were
negative, or at the most provisional; not vulgar, doubtless, but
ineffectually refined. A cold fatal gentlemanly weakness was
expressed indeed in his attenuated person. His eye was restless
and deprecating; his whole physiognomy, his manner of shifting
his weight from foot to foot, the spiritless droop of his head,