The slight grotesqueness of the man made him almost impossibly real in his abstracted earnestness.

He so much meant what he said that he ignored what his hands were doing, or his body or his head.

He had taken a very small, very dusty book out of a little shelf beside him, and was absently turning over the rusty leaves, while he talked with his head bent over it.

What was I to him, or he to me?
"I could give my Saturday afternoons to it," he was saying, "whenever you could come down." "It's immensely kind of you," I began.
"Not at all, not at all," he waived.

"I've set my heart on doing it and, unless you help me, I don't suppose I ever shall get it done." "But there are hundreds of others," I said.
"There may be," he said, "there may be.