They'd wait in rows
outside my door in the hope of hearing what was coming
next. By Crums, I'll go and begin it now! "And, with
another somersault over the end of the bed, he rushed
from the room, with the tassels of his dressing gown
flying behind him.
I daresay you've quite come to the conclusion by this
time that Cullingworth is simply an interesting
pathological study--a man in the first stage of lunacy or
general paralysis. You might not be so sure about it if
you were in close contact with him. He justifies his
wildest flights by what he does. It sounds grotesque
when put down in black and white; but then it would have
sounded equally grotesque a year ago if he had said
that he would build up a huge practice in a twelvemonth.
Now we see that he has done it. His possibilities are
immense. He has such huge energy at the back of his
fertility of invention. I am afraid, on thinking over
all that I have written to you, that I may have given you
a false impression of the man by dwelling too much on
those incidents in which he has shown the strange and
violent side of his character, and omitting the stretches
between where his wisdom and judgment have had a chance.
His conversation when he does not fly off at a tangent is
full of pith and idea. "The greatest monument ever
erected to Napoleon Buonaparte was the British National
debt," said he yesterday. Again, "We must never forget
that the principal export of Great Britain to the United
States IS the United States.
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