"Eyes" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wharton Edith)

Murchard had once said of him. "Or a phosphorescent log, rather,"
some one else amended; and we recognized the happiness of this
description of his small squat trunk, with the red blink of the eyes
in a face like mottled bark. He had always been possessed of a
leisure which he had nursed and protected, instead of squandering
it in vain activities. His carefully guarded hours had been devoted
to the cultivation of a fine intelligence and a few judiciously
chosen habits; and none of the disturbances common to human
experience seemed to have crossed his sky. Nevertheless, his
dispassionate survey of the universe had not raised his opinion of
that costly experiment, and his study of the human race seemed to
have resulted in the conclusion that all men were superfluous, and
women necessary only because some one had to do the cooking.
On the importance of this point his convictions were absolute, and
gastronomy was the only science which he revered as dogma. It
must be owned that his little dinners were a strong argument in
favour of this view, besides being a reason -- though not the main
one -- for the fidelity of his friends.

Mentally he exercised a hospitality less seductive but no less
stimulating. His mind was like a forum, or some open
meeting-place for the exchange of ideas: somewhat cold and
draughty, but light, spacious and orderly -- a kind of academic
grove from which all the leaves had fallen. In this privileged area a
dozen of us were wont to stretch our muscles and expand our
lungs; and, as if to prolong as much as possible the tradition of
what we felt to be a vanishing institution, one or two neophytes
were now and then added to our band.

Young Phil Frenham was the last, and the most interesting, of
these recruits, and a good example of Murchard's somewhat
morbid assertion that our old friend "liked 'em juicy." It was
indeed a fact that Culwin, for all his mental dryness, specially
tasted the lyric qualities in youth. As he was far too good an
Epicurean to nip the flowers of soul which he gathered for his
garden, his friendship was not a disintegrating influence: on the
contrary, it forced the young idea to robuster bloom. And in Phil
Frenham he had a fine subject for experimentation. The boy was
really intelligent, and the soundness of his nature was like the pure
paste under a delicate glaze. Culwin had fished him out of a thick
fog of family dulness, and pulled him up to a peak in Darien; and
the adventure hadn't hurt him a bit. Indeed, the skill with which
Culwin had contrived to stimulate his curiosities without robbing
them of their young bloom of awe seemed to me a sufficient
answer to Murchard's ogreish metaphor. There was nothing hectic
in Frenham's efflorescence, and his old friend had not laid even a
finger-tip on the sacred stupidities. One wanted no better proof of
that than the fact that Frenham still reverenced them in Culwin.

"There's a side of him you fellows don't see. I believe that story