"You'd better come into the other room," said Foster, looking about him as
though he had been just ruthlessly awakened from an important dream. They
passed through a little passage and an untidy sitting-room into the study.
This was a place piled high with books and its only furniture was a deal
table and two straw-bottomed chairs. At the table Foster had obviously
been working. Books lay about it and papers, and there was also a pile of
manuscript. Foster looked around him, caught his large ears in his fingers
and cracked them, and then suddenly said:
"You'd better sit down. What can I do for you?"
Ronder sat down. It was at once apparent that, whatever the state of the
rooms might be, his reluctant host was suddenly very wide awake indeed. He
felt, what he had known from the very first meeting, that he was in
contact here with a man of brain, of independence, of character. His
capacity for amused admiration that was one of the strongest things in
him, was roused to the full. Another thing that he had also by now
perceived was that Foster was not that type, by now so familiar to us in
the pages of French and English fiction, of the lost and bewildered old
clergyman whose long nose has been for so many years buried in dusty books
that he is unable to smell the real world.
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