He bore the impress of the ages; the whole man was clean-cut, aristocratic, finished, defined.
You instinctively looked up to him; which was perhaps the reason why you remembered his conspicuously intellectual forehead and his pathetically fastidious nose, and forgot the vacillating mouth that drooped under a scanty, colourless moustache, hiding its weakness out of sight.
Rickman had always looked up to him.

For Jewdwine, as Rankin had intimated, was the man who had discovered S.K.R.He was always discovering him.

Not, as he was careful to inform you, that this argued any sort of intimacy; on the contrary, it meant that he was always losing sight of him in between.

These lapses in their intercourse might be shorter or longer (they were frequently immense), but they had this advantage, that each fresh encounter presented Rickman as an entirely new thing, if anything, more curious and interesting than on the day, three years ago, when he unearthed him from behind the counter of a dingy second-hand bookshop in the City.
He felt responsible for that, too.
Rickman was instantly aware that he was under criticism.

But he mistook its nature and its grounds.
"Don't suppose," said he, "I'm ashamed of the shop.