The eye was wavering and profoundly melancholy; all the movements of the tall, finely-built frame were hesitating and doubtful.

It was as though the man were suffering from paralysis of some moral muscle or other; as if some of the normal springs of action in him had been profoundly and permanently weakened.
He had a curious history.

He was the only child of a doctor in a Lincolnshire country town.

His old parents had brought him up in strict provincial ways, ignoring the boy's idiosyncrasies as much as possible.
They did not want an exceptional and abnormal son, and they tried to put down his dreamy, self-conscious habits by forcing him into the common, middle-class Evangelical groove.

As soon as he got to college, however, the brooding, gifted nature had a moment of sudden and, as it seemed to the old people in Gainsborough, most reprehensible expansion.