"Very good. I'll do you a favour and take your word for it. Hah!"
This insolence was intolerable, and yet--and yet--and--yet it must be borne with for a while.
"I was saying, when you interrupted me a second time, that I could not tell the difference between the two, when I saw Miss Ashton this afternoon. Now I could."
"Indeed?" said Hanbury, with frigid politeness. At first this wretched creature had been all silky fur and purring sounds; now he seemed all claws and hisses.
"Yes. Miss Ashton has more go more vitality, more vigour, more verve, more enterprise, more enthusiasm, more divinity."
Hanbury turned round and gazed at the hunchback with astonishment. There was the hurry of eloquence in his words, and the flash of enthusiasm in his eyes. This man was not an ordinary man, physically or intellectually. Hanbury instantly altered his mental attitude towards the dwarf. He no longer assumed the pose of a superior, the method of a master. He recognised an equal. As Leigh had named the qualities of Dora, one by one, Hanbury had felt that thrill which always goes through a man of eloquent emotions when listening to felicitous description. In the judicious and intelligent use of a term there is freemasonry among intellectual men. It is by the phrase, and not the thought, that an intellectual man recognises a fellow. Thought is common, amorphous; with words the intellectual man models it into forms of beauty.
"I do not understand you," said Hanbury. "How do you connect vigour and divinity? The great gods did nothing."
"Ay, the great gods of the Greeks did nothing. But here in the North our gods are hard-working. You, I know, are a Tory."
"Well, it is somewhat doubtful what I am."
"I am for the people."