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Speaking generally, he was inclined to furrow up his forehead à la Descartes, and to assume half-recumbent attitudes by choice, rather than to sit erect.

These physical idiosyncrasies corresponded to an innate preference for the dressed rather than the undressed, even if the costume or the disguise was nothing more than hair. His wife was of course a born nudist; and he had recently, it is true, come to feel, especially at breakfast time, that he was in a nudist camp.

But this was a very abstracted man. He seldom saw his wife in full focus, but behind, or through, something else. He did not often completely withdraw himself from the intellectual problem he had in hand, when conversing with an intimate or even with a stranger. Inside him, he left simmering as it were, in the background of his mind, the dominant problem, in the way that a housewife reduces to a simmer something she has in hand, to leave her free for a short while for action elsewhere, in response to a sudden summons.

As he sat down he placed the telegram in his pocket and picked up the Daily Express. Filling himself a fresh cup of coffee he drank this in a long gulp. Replacing the cup in the saucer with fracas he continued to stare dully and angrily at the Daily Express headlines.