In appearance he was a man of middle height, with a long scraggy neck and a large head, which gave him the air of being much shorter than he really was; he had little, weak eyes, a nose and mouth of no particular shape, and very smooth hair of no definite color. He had a timid, deprecating air, which seemed due to the consciousness that he was an uninteresting anomaly, and he certainly was as impervious to the ordinary influence of his surroundings as any undergraduate well could be. He lived a colorless, aimless life in his little rooms under the roof, reading every morning from nine till two with a superstitiously mechanical regularity, though very often his books completely failed to convey any ideas whatever to his brain, which was not a particularly powerful organ. If the afternoon was fine he generally sought out his one friend, who was a few degrees less shy than himself, and they took a monosyllabic walk together; or if it was wet, he read the papers at the Union, and in the evening after hall he studied "general literature" (a graceful term for novels) or laboriously spelt out a sonata upon his piano--a habit which did not increase his popularity. Fortunately for Flushington, he had no gyp, or his life might have been made a positive burden to him, and with his bedmaker he was rather a favorite as "a gentleman what gave no trouble"--meaning that, when he observed his sherry unaccountably sinking, like the water in a lock when the sluices are up, Flushington was too delicate to refer to the phenomenon. He was sitting one afternoon over his modest lunch of bread and butter, potted meat and lemonade, when all at once he heard a sound of unusual voices and a strange flutter of dresses coming up the winding stone staircase outside, and was instantly seized with a cold dread. There was no particular reason for being alarmed, although there were certainly ladies mounting the steps. Probably they were friends of the man opposite, who was always having his people up; but still Flushington had that odd presentiment which nervous people have sometimes that something unpleasant is on its way to them, and he half rose from his chair to shut his outer oak. It was too late; the dresses were rustling now in his very passage; there was a pause, a few faint, smothered laughs and little feminine coughs--then two taps at the door.