..
Philip looked curiously at Thorpe Athelny. He did not know whether he felt
a little shy with him or was attracted by him. He was conscious that his
manner had been slightly patronising, and he flushed as it struck him that
Athelny might have thought him ridiculous.
"What an unusual name you've got," he remarked, for something to say.
"It's a very old Yorkshire name. Once it took the head of my family a
day's hard riding to make the circuit of his estates, but the mighty are
fallen. Fast women and slow horses."
He was short-sighted and when he spoke looked at you with a peculiar
intensity. He took up his volume of poetry.
"You should read Spanish," he said. "It is a noble tongue. It has not the
mellifluousness of Italian, Italian is the language of tenors and
organ-grinders, but it has grandeur: it does not ripple like a brook in a
garden, but it surges tumultuous like a mighty river in flood."
His grandiloquence amused Philip, but he was sensitive to rhetoric; and he
listened with pleasure while Athelny, with picturesque expressions and the
fire of a real enthusiasm, described to him the rich delight of reading
Don Quixote in the original and the music, romantic, limpid, passionate,
of the enchanting Calderon.
"I must get on with my work," said Philip presently.
"Oh, forgive me, I forgot.
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