"I am thirty years of age, but I look to be forty-five at least."
I looked him straight in the face. His shrunken figure, badly cared for, gave one the impression that he was an old man. On the summit of his cranium, a few long hairs shot straight up from a skin of doubtful cleanness. He had enormous eyelashes, a large mustache, and a thick beard. Suddenly I had a kind of vision, I know not why—the vision of a basin filled with noisome water, the water which should have been applied to that poll. I said to him:
"Verily, you look to be more than that age. Of a certainty you must have experienced some great disappointment."
He replied:
"I tell you that I have not. I am old because I never take air. There is nothing that vitiates the life of a man more than the atmosphere of a cafe." I could not believe him.
"You must surely have been married as well? One could not get as baldheaded as you are without having been much in love."
He shook his head, sending down his back little hairs from the scalp:
"No, I have always been virtuous."
And raising his eyes toward the luster, which beat down on our heads, he said:
"If I am baldheaded, it is the fault of the gas. It is the enemy of hair. Waiter, a 'bock.' You must be thirsty also?"