When I sat at work I half-faced a deep, upholstered chair which stood at
the end of my table, its high back against the wall. I had bought it with
great care. My instructor sometimes looked in upon me when he was out for
an evening tramp, and I noticed that he was more likely to linger and
become talkative if I had a comfortable chair for him to sit in, and if he
found a bottle of Benedictine and plenty of the kind of cigarettes he
liked, at his elbow. He was, I had discovered, parsimonious about small
expenditures--a trait absolutely inconsistent with his general character.
Sometimes when he came he was silent and moody, and after a few sarcastic
remarks went away again, to tramp the streets of Lincoln, which were almost
as quiet and oppressively domestic as those of Black Hawk. Again, he would
sit until nearly midnight, talking about Latin and English poetry, or
telling me about his long stay in Italy.
I can give no idea of the peculiar charm and vividness of his talk. In a
crowd he was nearly always silent. Even for his classroom he had no
platitudes, no stock of professorial anecdotes. When he was tired, his
lectures were clouded, obscure, elliptical; but when he was interested they
were wonderful. I believe that Gaston Cleric narrowly missed being a great
poet, and I have sometimes thought that his bursts of imaginative talk were
fatal to his poetic gift.
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