This man was in about his fortieth
year, tall, spare, keenly intellectual in countenance, cold, possessed of
an absolute reliance on the powers of science, beyond which his mental
processes did not stray. His manner was distinguished by a stiff unbending
formality; his expression by a glacial coldness of steel-gray eyes and a
straight-line compression of thin lips; his dress by a precise and
unvarying formalism, and his speech by a curious polysyllabic stiffness.
This latter idiosyncrasy would, in another, have seemed either priggish or
facetiously intended. With Professor Eldridge it was merely a natural
method of speech. Thus, arriving once at the stroke of the dinner hour, he
replied to compliments on his punctuality by remarking:
"I have always considered punctuality a virtue when one is invited to
partake of gratuitous nourishment."
Withal, his scientific attainments were not only undoubted, but so
considerable as to have won for him against many odds the reputation of a
great scientist. His specialty, if such it might be called, was scientific
diagnosis. The exactness of scientific laws was so admirably duplicated by
the exactitudes of his mind that he seemed able, by a bloodless and
mechanical sympathy, to penetrate to the most obscure causes of the
strangest events. It might be added that practically his only social ties
were those with the Warfords, and that the only woman with whom he ever
entered into conversation was Helen.
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