Nevertheless he was a
member of the Olympus Club, where he frequently spent his evenings. But
he made very few acquaintances even there, and I believe that except
myself, Jack Ashton, Henry Darton, and Will Church, he had no intimates.
And we knew him only at the club. There, when he was alone with us, he
sometimes partly opened up his mind, and we were charmed by his variety
of knowledge and the singularity of his conversation. I shall not
disguise the fact that we thought him extremely eccentric, although the
idea of anything in the nature of insanity never entered our heads. We
knew that he was engaged in recondite researches of a scientific nature,
and that he possessed a private laboratory, although none of us had ever
entered it. Occasionally he would speak of some new advance of science,
throwing a flood of light by his clear expositions upon things of which
we should otherwise have remained profoundly ignorant. His imagination
flashed like lightning over the subject of his talk, revealing it at the
most unexpected angles, and often he roused us to real enthusiasm for
things the very names of which we almost forgot amidst the next day's
occupations.
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