Mr. Charles Proctor Dawn was a little fat man of fifty-something. He had prying triangular eyes of a very light color, a short fleshy nose, and a fleshier mouth whose greediness was only partly hidden between a ragged gray mustache and a ragged gray Vandyke beard. His clothes were dark and unclean looking without actually being dirty.
He didn’t get up from his desk, and throughout my visit he kept his right hand on the edge of a desk drawer that was some six inches open.
He said:
“Ah, my dear sir, I am extremely gratified to find that you had the good judgment to recognize the value of my counsel.”
His voice was even more oratorical than it had been over the wire.
I didn’t say anything.
Nodding his whiskers as if my not saying anything was another exhibition of good judgment, he continued:
“I may say, in all justice, that you will find it the invariable part of sound judgment to follow the dictates of my counsel in all cases. I may say this, my dear sir, without false modesty, appreciating with both fitting humility and a deep sense of true and lasting values, my responsibilities as well as my prerogatives as a—and why should I stoop to conceal the fact that there are those who feel justified in preferring to substitute the definite article for the indefinite?—recognized and accepted leader of the bar in this thriving state.”
He knew a lot of sentences like those, and he didn’t mind using them on me. Finally he got along to: