Beauchamp beheld a middle-sized round man, with loose lips and pendant indigo jowl, whose eyes twinkled watery, like pebbles under the shore- wash, and whose neck-band needed an extra touch from fingers other than his own.
'I am sorry to have disturbed you so early,' he replied.
'Not a bit, Commander Beauchamp, not a bit, sir. Early or late, and ay ready—with the Napiers; I'll wash, I'll wash.'
'I came to speak to you of this article of yours on me. They tell me in the office that you are the writer. Pray don't "Commander" me so much. —It's not customary, and I object to it.'
'Certainly, certainly,' Timothy acquiesced.
'And for the future, Mr. Turbot, please to be good enough not to allude in print to any of my performances here and there. Your intentions are complimentary, but it happens that I don't like a public patting on the back.'
'No, and that's true,' said Timothy.
His appreciative and sympathetic agreement with these sharp strictures on the article brought Beauchamp to a stop.
Timothy waited for him; then, smoothing his prickly cheek, remarked: 'If I'd guessed your errand, Commander Beauchamp, I'd have called in the barber before I came down, just to make myself decent for a 'first introduction.'
Beauchamp was not insensible to the slyness of the poke at him. 'You see, I come to the borough unknown to it, and as quietly as possible, and I want to be taken as a politician,' he continued, for the sake of showing that he had sufficient to say to account for his hasty and peremptory summons of the writer of that article to his presence. 'It's excessively disagreeable to have one's family lugged into notice in a newspaper—especially if they are of different politics. I feel it.'