and since he seemed ready for society, and even pathetically
pleased with it, I tossed the Daily Wire over a hedge and fell
into speech with him. He wore a wreck of respectable clothes,
and his face had that plebeian refinement which one sees in small
tailors and watchmakers, in poor men of sedentary trades.
Behind him a twisted group of winter trees stood up as gaunt
and tattered as himself, but I do not think that the tragedy
that he symbolized was a mere fancy from the spectral wood.
There was a fixed look in his face which told that he was one
of those who in keeping body and soul together have difficulties
not only with the body, but also with the soul.

He was a Cockney by birth, and retained the touching accent
of those streets from which I am an exile; but he had lived nearly
all his life in this countryside; and he began to tell me the affairs
of it in that formless, tail-foremost way in which the poor
gossip about their great neighbours. Names kept coming and going
in the narrative like charms or spells, unaccompanied by any
biographical explanation. In particular the name of somebody called
Sir Joseph multiplied itself with the omnipresence of a deity.
I took Sir Joseph to be the principal landowner of the district;
and as the confused picture unfolded itself, I began to form
a definite and by no means pleasing picture of Sir Joseph.
He was spoken of in a strange way, frigid and yet familiar, as a child
might speak of a stepmother or an unavoidable nurse; something intimate,
but by no means tender; something that was waiting for you by your own
bed and board; that told you to do this and forbade you to do that,
with a caprice that was cold and yet somehow personal. It did not
appear that Sir Joseph was popular, but he was "a household word."
He was not so much a public man as a sort of private god or omnipotence.