I am going to open a practice in that neighbourhood,
and thought I would lose no time. The hat and umbrella over there
are all right, if you'll give yourself the trouble to examine them.
I bought them on the way along."
He was right, in a way, about his clothes. (I believe I have already
mentioned that Jack had always dressed himself carefully and in good
form.) His frock-coat had a fullness of skirt, and his trousers a
bluish aggressive tint, that I couldn't pass for metropolitan.
His boots were worse--of some wrong sort of patent leather. But they
ought not to have altered the man as I felt that he was altered.
. . . Yes, cheapened and coarsened, in some indefinable way.
His hair had thinned and showed a bald patch: not a large patch:
still, there it was. His shape had been rather noticeably slim.
I won't say that it had grown pursy, but it had run to seed somehow.
Least of all I liked the change in his eyes, which bulged somewhat,
showing an unhealthy white glitter. I set down this glitter as due
to long weeks at sea: but the explanation couldn't quite satisfy me.
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