At Lilly's entrance, Isaac Neugass came shuffling around the
ground-glass prescription partition, his hands at their perpetual dry
washing of each other. There was something of a dressed-up wishbone
about him, in the way his clothing scarcely suggested the thin body
within them. They had scarcely a point of contact, even with his angles.
He was a mere inner tubing to what he wore. A skull cap hid his
baldness, a fringe of gray below it suggesting what was not beneath it.
His little eyes were like steel, humorously glinting gimlets in the
process of boring, the old face wrinkling up around them as pliantly as
a dough eraser. In fact, when he laughed his little chin with the tip of
beard did curl up like one of those rubber-toy faces where chin
kicks brow.
"Well," he said, with a great dip of nose down into his smile, "whad can
I do for you?" He reminded Lilly of a great auk, something alcidine in
the thin cheeks with the mouth cutting so widely toward the ears.
She had not realized it, but suddenly the terrible, the impersonal
detachment of the past weeks smote her. There had been voiceless days
and days when the sound of herself asking direction or ordering from a
bill of fare had an element of surprise in it, and the toneless voice of
public service was the only one directed to her: "Step lively.
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