Every one
was swimming in an uncertain world; the unreality grew with the
heat. Maggie herself, at the end of Mr. Warlock's prayer, felt that
her test of a real solid and unimaginative world was leaving her.
She was expectant like the rest, as ready to believe anything at
all.
Out of the mist rose Mr. Crashaw. This was a little old man with a
crabbed face and a body that seemed to have endured infernal
twistings in some Inquisitioner's torture-chamber. Maggie learnt
afterwards that he had suffered for many years from intolerable
rheumatism, but to-night the contortions and windings of the body
with which he climbed up onto the platform, and then the grimaces
that he made as his large round head peered over the top of the
desk, might have struck any less solemn assemblage as farcical. He
wore an old shiny black frock coat and a white rather grimy tie
fastened in a sharp little bow. His face was lined like a map, his
cheeks seamed and furrowed, his forehead a wilderness of marks, his
scanty hair brushed straight back so that the top of his forehead
seemed unnaturally shiny and bald; his hands, with which he clutched
the side of his desk, were brown and wrinkled and grasping like a
monkey's.
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