He must have told the others about it afterwards, his face crinkling at them and they listening and agreeing.
It had begun the moment after he had suggested the concert. I’ll get a new top hat before then. The awful demand for a jest. His way of waiting as if one were some queer being he was waiting to see say or do something anyone could understand was the same as the English way only more open. But English people like that did not care for music and did not have books read to them. Perhaps his parents belonged to the other sort of English and he had the stamp of it, promising seriousness and a love of beautiful things, and forced by life into the jesting way of worldly people who seemed to have no sacred patches at all. Quick words, bathed in laughter heaped up into a questioning of what the matter was. Men, demanding jests and amusement; women succeeding only by jesting satirically about everything.
Von Heber’s a man who’ll carve his way. … My. He’s great . Carve his way; one of those phrases that satisfy and worry you; short, and leaving out nearly everything; Dr. von Heber going through life with a chisel, intent on carving; everybody envying him; the von Heber not seen or realised; his way is carved, he is his way … going ahead further and further away as one listened. His poverty and drudgery behind him, at Winnipeg, amongst the ice. Hoisting himself out of it, making himself into a doctor; a graduate of “McGill” … standing out among the graduates with even the very manner of success more marked in him than in them with their money and ease; sailing to England steady-minded in the awful risk of borrowed money … it’s wrong, insulting to him to think of it while he is still in the midst of the effort … a sort of treachery to know the details at all … the impossibility of not dwelling on them. But thinking disperses his general effect. In the strength and sunshine of him there is power. The things he has done are the power in him; no need to know the gossipy details; that was why the facts sounded so familiar; reproachful, as Dr. Hurd brought them out. …