Mr John Tanner suddenly opens the door and enters. He is too young to be described simply as a big man with a beard. But it is already plain that middle life will find him in that category. He has still some of the slimness of youth; but youthfulness is not the effect he aims at: his frock coat would befit a prime minister; and a certain high chested carriage of the shoulders, a lofty pose of the head, and the Olympian majesty with which a mane, or rather a huge wisp, of hazel colored hair is thrown back from an imposing brow, suggest Jupiter rather than Apollo. He is prodigiously fluent of speech, restless, excitable (mark the snorting nostril and the restless blue eye, just the thirty-secondth of an inch too wide open), possibly a little mad. He is carefully dressed, not from the vanity that cannot resist finery, but from a sense of the importance of everything he does which leads him to make as much of paying a call as other men do of getting married or laying a foundation stone. A sensitive, susceptible, exaggerative, earnest man: a megalomaniac, who would be lost without a sense of humor. Just at present the sense of humor is in abeyance. To say that he is excited is nothing: all his moods are phases of excitement. He is now in the panic-stricken phase; and he walks straight up to Ramsden as if with the fixed intention of shooting him on his own hearthrug. But what he pulls from his breast pocket is not a pistol, but a foolscap document which he thrusts under the indignant nose of Ramsden as he exclaims-- TANNER. Ramsden: do you know what that is? RAMSDEN. [loftily] No, Sir. TANNER. It's a copy of Whitefield's will. Ann got it this morning. RAMSDEN. When you say Ann, you mean, I presume, Miss Whitefield. TANNER. I mean our Ann, your Ann, Tavy's Ann, and now, Heaven help me, my Ann! OCTAVIUS. [rising, very pale] What do you mean? TANNER. Mean! [He holds up the will]. Do you know who is appointed Ann's guardian by this will? RAMSDEN. [coolly] I believe I am. TANNER. You! You and I, man. I! I!! I!!! Both of us! [He flings the will down on the writing table]. RAMSDEN. You! Impossible. TANNER. It's only too hideously true. [He throws himself into Octavius's chair]. Ramsden: get me out of it somehow. You don't know Ann as well as I do. She'll commit every crime a respectable woman can; and she'll justify every one of them by saying that it was the wish of her guardians. She'll put everything on us; and we shall have no more control over her than a couple of mice over a cat. OCTAVIUS. Jack: I wish you wouldn't talk like that about Ann. TANNER. This chap's in love with her: that's another complication. Well, she'll either jilt him and say I didn't approve of him, or marry him and say you ordered her to. I tell you, this is the most staggering blow that has ever fallen on a man of my age and temperament.