"He was, as I have said, all the talk that summer. It was 'Mr. Crispin' this and 'Mr. Crispin' that--Mr. Crispin everything. The men didn't take to him much, but of course they wouldn't! They had always thought _me_ a bit queer because I liked reading and played the piano. The first thing that people didn't like about him was his son. That beauty arrived at Haxt somewhere in September, and everybody hated him. I ask you, could you help it? And he was the exact opposite of his father. _He_ didn't try to make himself agreeable to anybody--simply went about scowling and frowning. But it wasn't that people disliked--it was his relation to his father. He was absolutely in his father's power--that is the only way to put it--and there was something despicable, something almost obscene, you know, almost as though he were hypnotized, the way he obeyed him, listened to his voice, slaved away for him." "I noticed something of that myself this evening," said Harkness. "You couldn't help it if you saw them together. Somehow the son turning up beside the father made the _father_ look queer--as though the son showed him up. People round Milton are not very perceptive, you know, but they soon smelt a rat, several rats in fact. For one thing the people in the village didn't like the Jap servants, then one or two maids that Crispin had hired abruptly left. They wouldn't say anything except that they didn't like the place, that old Crispin walked in his sleep or something of the kind. "It was just about this time, early in October or so, that Crispin became friendly with the Tobins. Young Crispin had a cold or something and Tobin came up and doctored him. Crispin gave him the best liquor he'd ever had in his life so he came again and then again. That was the beginning of my dislike of Crispin. It seemed to me rotten of him, when Tobin was already going as fast downhill as he could, to give him an extra push. And Crispin liked doing that. One could see it at a glance. I hated him from the moment when I caught him watching with amused smiles Tobin fuddled in his chair. You can imagine that Tobin's drunkenness, having cared for Hesther as I had for so long, was a matter of some importance for me. I had tried to pull him up, without any sort of success, of course, and it simply maddened me to see what Crispin was doing. So I lost my temper and spoke out. I told him what I thought of him. He listened to me very quietly, then he suddenly threw his head up at me like a snake hissing. He said a lot of things. That was the first time I heard all his nonsensical stuff about sensations. We haven't time now, and anyway it wasn't very new--the philosophy that as this was our only existence we had better make the most of it, that we had been given our senses to use, not to stifle, and the rest of it. Omar put it better than Crispin.