MOON-FACE
John Claverhouse was a moon-faced man. You know the kind, cheekbones
wide apart, chin and forehead melting into the cheeks to complete
the perfect round, and the nose, broad and pudgy, equidistant from the
circumference, flattened against the very centre of the face like a doughball
upon the ceiling. Perhaps that is why I hated him, for truly he had
become an offense to my eyes, and I believed the earth to be cumbered
with his presence. Perhaps my mother may have been superstitious of the
moon and looked upon it over the wrong shoulder at the wrong time.
Be that as it may, I hated John Claverhouse. Not that he had done me
what society would consider a wrong or an ill turn. Far from it. The evil
was of a deeper, subtler sort; so elusive, so intangible, as to defy clear,
definite analysis in words. We all experience such things at some period in
our lives. For the first time we see a certain individual, one who the very
instant before we did not dream existed; and yet, at the first moment of
meeting, we say: "I do not like that man." Why do we not like him? Ah,
we do not know why; we know only that we do not. We have taken a
dislike, that is all. And so I with John Claverhouse.