Blighted and battered, but still responsive and still ironic, his face was like a lighted lantern patched with paper and unsteadily held; his thin whisker languished upon a lean cheek; the exorbitant curve of his nose defined itself more sharply.

Lean he was altogether, lean and long and loose-jointed; an accidental cohesion of relaxed angles.

His brown velvet jacket had become perennial; his hands had fixed themselves in his pockets; he shambled and stumbled and shuffled in a manner that denoted great physical helplessness.

It was perhaps this whimsical gait that helped to mark his character more than ever as that of the humorous invalid--the invalid for whom even his own disabilities are part of the general joke.

They might well indeed with Ralph have been the chief cause of the want of seriousness marking his view of a world in which the reason for his own continued presence was past finding out.