He arrayed himself with scrupulous neatness, and always dressed for Hall. He invariably wore a tall hat, and carried the neatest of gold-topped umbrellas. His gait was peculiar: he had a slight stoop, and dragged one foot slightly, advancing with a certain delicacy. He disliked stopping to talk to people, and often was at some pains not to appear to recognise them; he had a peculiar courteous gesture of the hand, if recognition was inevitable, by which he paid a certain tribute of courtesy, and yet contrived to indicate that he wished to be unmolested. He was shy in large mixed assemblies, but his shyness did not make him silent or abrupt. He was apt to talk, gently and persistently, of trivial topics, using his conversation rather as a shield against undue intimacy. People on first meeting him were sometimes struck with the extraordinary conventionality of his manners and conversation in society; but this almost oppressive suavity melted into a gentle and sympathetic kindness on further acquaintance. A friend, writing to Miss Pater after her brother’s death, spoke of “his kindness, his sweetness, his gentle and amiable wearing of all his great gifts, his happy and gracious willingness to give all around him the enjoyment of them.” Another friend of his writes:— “The only attitude I ever observed in Pater, the only mood I saw him in, was a sort of weary courtesy with which he used to treat me, with somehow a deep kindness shining through. It was as though he would have liked to lavish sympathy and even affection, but was frightened of the responsibility and unequal to the effort. He seemed to me, if I may use an allegory, to point to a sack of treasure, and say,—‘That is yours, if you like to take it; I am only sorry that I am too tired myself to rise and place it in your hands.’” But, on the other hand, Dr. Bussell, the closest companion in the later years, writes of the side of himself that Pater turned to the nearer circle:— “His ordinary talk ... was the happiest blending of seriousness and mirth, of deep feeling and a sort of childlike glee in the varying surfaces of things.”