He had an odd name for the serious mental preoccupations which absorbed him in his picturesque retreat; he called them “taking stock”; the expression, crude as it was, defined for him an employment which he loved, even though it was bound up in his mind with the phenomena of fear and giddiness and palpitation, and made his face burn even more than its wont. Yet there seemed a peculiar fitness in the fact that the mental strain involved obliged him to make use of the ancestral chin-support; that way of holding his head lent him an outward dignity in keeping with thoughts which passed through his brain as he contemplated the image.

“ Homo dei