was thinking, it makes your ideas look short in the sleeves and tight across the chest. Nevertheless he envied Eric for having shot, knowing by now that he himself would stick at a mere five foot eight. In the days when they were at St. Basil's together, and approximately the same height, in body if not in mind; Eric's influence over him, the feeling of worship he had inspired, had been all the more potent for being inexplicable. This afternoon, his intuition freshened by a musical bath, Grover felt he could localize Eric's might in the elusive curves at the corners of his mouth. Eric's curly lips, Samson's locks,—c'était quasiment, as Claudine would say. Smiling curves indicative of emotional possibilities which would, no doubt, remain forever undeveloped, so strong were the agencies directing and repressing Eric's actions: the well-bred young American, magnificently equipped for adventures that would never occur to him!
Poor foolish mortals, he was thinking, how pathetic that we must be forever attributing magic prestige to the things we are fond of. Realizing for the first time that Eric was, like himself, merely a combination of slugs and snails and puppy-dog tails, Grover was abruptly released from a thrall that had held him six or seven years, and though it was disheartening to be thus bereft of a good illusion, he smiled with a secret sense of advantage. For his own ideas weren't short in the sleeve and tight across the chest: if anything they were a size too big for him, a better fault.
