But now that I resume the main line of my story it may be well to
describe the personal appearance of my uncle as I remember him during
those magnificent years that followed his passage from trade to finance.
The little man plumped up very considerably during the creation of the
Tono-Bungay property, but with the increasing excitements that followed
that first flotation came dyspepsia and a certain flabbiness and falling
away. His abdomen--if the reader will pardon my taking his features
in the order of their value--had at first a nice full roundness, but
afterwards it lost tone without, however, losing size. He always went as
though he was proud of it and would make as much of it as possible. To
the last his movements remained quick and sudden, his short firm legs,
as he walked, seemed to twinkle rather than display the scissors-stride
of common humanity, and he never seemed to have knees, but instead, a
dispersed flexibility of limb.

There was, I seem to remember, a secular intensification of his
features; his nose developed character, became aggressive, stuck out at
the world more and more; the obliquity of his mouth, I think, increased.
From the face that returns to my memory projects a long cigar that is
sometimes cocked jauntily up from the higher corner, that sometimes
droops from the lower;--it was as eloquent as a dog's tail, and he
removed it only for the more emphatic modes of speech. He assumed a
broad black ribbon for his glasses, and wore them more and more askew as
time went on. His hair seemed to stiffen with success, but towards the
climax it thinned greatly over the crown, and he brushed it hard back
over his ears where, however, it stuck out fiercely. It always stuck out
fiercely over his forehead, up and forward.

He adopted an urban style of dressing with the onset of Tono-Bungay and