He might be depressed in spirits, or crabbed in temper: the fact remained that, even now, he had nothing to say.

He opened a door on the opposite side of the passage--made another bow--and vanished.
"Don't come near me!" cried Benjulia, the moment Ovid showed himself.
The doctor was seated in an inner corner of the room; robed in a long black dressing-gown, buttoned round his throat, which hid every part of him below his fleshless face, except his big hands, and his tortured gouty foot.

Rage and pain glared in his gloomy gray eyes, and shook his clenched fists, resting on the arms of an easy chair.

"Ten thousand red-hot devils are boring ten thousand holes through my foot," he said.
"If you touch the pillow on my stool, I shall fly at your throat." He poured some cooling lotion from a bottle into a small watering-pot, and irrigated his foot as if it had been a bed of flowers.

By way of further relief to the pain, he swore ferociously; addressing his oaths to himself, in thunderous undertones which made the glasses ring on the sideboard.
Relieved, in his present frame of mind, to have escaped the necessity of shaking hands, Ovid took a chair, and looked about him.