and our last glimpse was of the opalescent reflection of a lamp upon a cranium astonishingly bald.
"Old man Dickson," somebody said, significantly; "paralysed, as usual."
"That man," said Courtland, with a vague gesture toward the door just slammed; "that man is the victim of a most atrocious and absurd tragedy."
And he told it to us thus:
I first knew him through his newspaper work. Every morning he shuffled gently into my office and asked if there was anything new. He did this with a want of assurance strange in a reporter, and yet not at all with humility; but rather in a dreamy, detached manner, as if he really did not care if there was anything new, and would probably not remember it if there were; as if the thing of importance, after all, were the internal problem upon which he was pondering, pondering with a discreet intensity that left his arms to hang in uncouth limpness, his feet to drag, his head to sink sideways toward his right shoulder, his whole body to appear as if abandoned, utterly abandoned, of the spiritual being—to hang, loose, limp, ungoverned, like a scarcrow which lives, gesticulates, postures only with the caprices of the wind. His whole body, I said; I should except the eyes. They were magnificent eyes, large, limpid, serenely blue.
