Mr. Scogan. "Bottles?" she said. "Do you really think so? Bottles..."
CHAPTER VI. Mr. Barbecue-Smith arrived in time for tea on Saturday
afternoon. He was a short and corpulent man, with a very large head and
no neck. In his earlier middle age he had been distressed by this
absence of neck, but was comforted by reading in Balzac's "Louis
Lambert" that all the world's great men have been marked by the same
peculiarity, and for a simple and obvious reason: Greatness is nothing
more nor less than the harmonious functioning of the faculties of the
head and heart; the shorter the neck, the more closely these two organs
approach one another; argal...It was convincing. Mr. Barbecue-Smith
belonged to the old school of journalists. He sported a leonine head
with a greyish-black mane of oddly unappetising hair brushed back from a
broad but low forehead. And somehow he always seemed slightly, ever so
slightly, soiled. In younger days he had gaily called himself a
Bohemian. He did so no longer. He was a teacher now, a kind of prophet.
Some of his books of comfort and spiritual teaching were in their
hundred and twentieth thousand. Priscilla received him with every mark
of esteem. He had never been to Crome before; she showed him round the
house. Mr. Barbecue-Smith was full of admiration. "So quaint, so
old-world," he kept repeating. He had a rich, rather unctuous voice.
Priscilla praised his latest book. "Splendid, I thought it was," she
said in her large, jolly way. "I'm happy to think you found it a
comfort," said Mr. Barbecue-Smith. "Oh, tremendously! And the bit about
the Lotus Pool--I thought that so beautiful." "I
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