Page:Imre.pdf/65

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63

Imre could open himself to me thereon, or not: I was not curious, nor a purveyor of reading-matter to fashionable London journals.


Two matters more in this diagnosis . . . shall I call it so? . . . of my friend. Let me rather say that it is a memorandum and guidebook of Imres' emotional topography.

Something has been said of the spontaneous warmth of his temperament, and of his enthusiasm for his closer friends. But his undemonstrativeness also mentioned, seemed to me more and more curiously accentuated. Imre might have been an Englishman, if it came to outward signs of his innermost feelings. He neither embraced, kissed, caressed nor what else his friends; and, as I had surmised, when first being with him and them, he did not appear to like what in his part of the world are ordinary degrees of 'demonstrativeness'. He never invited nor returned (to speak as Brutus)—"the shows of love in other men". There was a certain captain in the A . . . . Regiment, a man that Imre much liked and, what is more, had more than