Hardly a beautiful or a vivid face, hardly a wicked one, never anything transfigured, passionate, terrible, or grand.

Nothing Greek, early Italian, Elizabethan, not even beefy, beery, broad old Georgian.
Something clutched-in, and squashed-out about it all--on that collective face something of the look of a man almost comfortably and warmly wrapped round by a snake at the very beginning of its squeeze.

It gave Felix Freeland a sort of faint excitement and pleasure to notice this.
For it was his business to notice things, and embalm them afterward in ink.

And he believed that not many people noticed it, so that it contributed in his mind to his own distinction, which was precious to him.

Precious, and encouraged to be so by the press, which--as he well knew--must print his name several thousand times a year.