She is a thick-set, black-haired woman, and looks at me disapprovingly out of the corner of her eye as if I were a blackbeetle which she would like to squash under foot.

She tolerates me, however, on account of the tongues and other sustenance sent by Rogers from Benoist, of which she consumes prodigious quantities.

She wonders, as far as the power of wonder is given to her dull brain, what on earth I am doing here.

I see her whispering to her friends as I enter the house, and I know they are wondering what I am doing here.

The whole village regards me as a humorous zoological freak, and wonders what I am doing here among normal human beings.
And what am I doing here--I, Simon de Gex, M.P., the spoilt darling of fortune, as my opponent in the Labour interest called me during the last electoral campaign?
My disciple and secretary, young Dale Kynnersley, the only mortal besides Rogers who knows my whereabouts, trembles for my reason.