“My name is Stoss.”

“Mine, Von Kammacher.”

“It’s very good of you to keep me company.  That Hahlstroem and his henchman are disgusting.  Though I have been an actor for twenty years, I can’t stand the sight of such weedy weaklings, who don’t do anything themselves and exploit their daughters.  They have the effect of an emetic on me.  For all that, he plays the great man.  He has no talent, so he is going to boil soup from his daughter’s bones.  Yet he goes about nose up in the air.  If he sees a dollar in the dirt and somebody of distinction is looking, he will let it lie.  He won’t pick it up.  There is no denying he has an attractive appearance.  He has the stuff in him for a very clever, fashionable swindler.  But he would rather take it easy and live off his daughter and his daughter’s admirers.  It’s astonishing how many people are willing to make asses of themselves.  There’s that Achleitner—­look at the condescension with which Hahlstroem treats him and the lofty way Hahlstroem plays the role of benefactor!  He used to be a riding-master.  Then he got mixed up in some quack cure, a combination of Swedish gymnastics and hydrotherapeutics, and his wife left him, a fine, hard-working woman, now doing splendidly as head of a department at Worth’s in Paris.”

Frederick felt drawn up-stairs to Hahlstroem.  The man’s past as Stoss described it was at that moment a matter of indifference to him.  But Stoss’s remark about the asses some people are willing to make of themselves sent a fleeting red to his face.

Arthur Stoss grew more and more communicative.  He sat like an ape, a resemblance impossible to avoid when a man uses his feet instead of his hands.  When he had finished his meal, he stuck a cigar in his mouth, like any other gentleman.  In him the likeness to an ape was accentuated by the breadth and flatness of his nose and the formation of his heavy jaws.  He looked like a fair-skinned orang-outang.  However, his high, broad forehead gave him the mark of the human intellect.  He had no beard, that is, he had never in his life, probably, had to remove a hair from his parchmenty, freckled, yellow skin.  His cheek bones were prominent, and his head unusually large.  Though his general appearance made a most energetic, by no means effeminate impression, there still was something eunuch-like about it, the high pitch of his voice adding to this impression.  While casting about for an opportunity to escape the monster’s spell, Frederick was nevertheless deeply interested in him from a medical and anthropological standpoint.  The man, without doubt, was an extremely instructive specimen of abnormality.  His facies was that of an intermediate sexual stage.