benevolent yet rugged face, every gesture full of gentle kindness, he would pat his old wife on the shoulder and take the child upon his knee, and beg me to play the fiddle to him or to draw my chair up for an intimate talk. He would light his great meerschaum pipe and beam upon the world through the blue smoke like some old jolly idol. The change seemed miraculous.
His talk seemed, at the time, wonderful to me. He would discourse on Kant, Novalis, Heine, on music, science, astronomy--"when your troubles seem at their worst," he would say, "look up at the stars for half an hour, with imagination, and you'll see your troubles in a new perspective"--on religion, literature and life, on anything and everything, while downstairs his kindly old wife prepared the Frankfurters and sauerkraut and coffee.
Neither mother nor child, I noticed, paid much attention to his attacks. The little girl, who called her father "Otto," sat up with us night after night till two in the morning, and hated going to bed. She listened spellbound to the stream of talk. I still see the dingy, lamp-lit room in the heart of the roaring city, the white-haired old doctor, pipe in mouth, the operating chair in the middle of the floor, the little pale-faced child with her odd expression of maturity as she looked from him to me, then led me by the hand to our late meal in the gloomy basement. I often waited achingly for that meal, having eaten nothing since breakfast. Would he never stop talking...?
We talked of Boyde--his face. The doctor's reading of Boyde's face was that it was a bad, deceitful, clever face, evil, brutal and cruel. I mentioned the man's various acts of kindness. "Bait," he exclaimed, with a scornful snort, "mere bait! He wanted a free lodging. He had plenty of money all along, but the free bed gave him more--to spend on himself while you starved."
He talked on about faces.... Handsome ones he either disliked or distrusted, handsome features like Boyde's were too often a cloak that helped to hide and
deceive. Behind such faces, as a rule, lay either badness
