I think George Boon did on the whole enjoy the remarkable setting of
his philosophical detachment very keenly; the monstrous fame of him
that rolled about the world, that set out east and came back
circumferentially from the west and beat again upon his doors. He
laughed irresponsibly, spent the resulting money with an intelligent
generosity, and talked of other things. "It is the quality of life,"
he said, and "The people love to have it so."
I seem to see him still, hurrying but not dismayed, in flight from the
camera of an intrusive admirer--an admirer not so much of him as of
his popularity--up one of his garden walks towards his agreeable
study. I recall his round, enigmatical face, an affair of rosy
rotundities, his very bright, active eyes, his queer, wiry, black hair
that went out to every point in the heavens, his ankles and neck and
wrists all protruding from his garments in their own peculiar way,
protruding a little more in the stress of flight. I recall, too, his
general effect of careless and, on the whole, commendable dirtiness,
accentuated rather than corrected by the vivid tie of soft
orange-coloured silk he invariably wore, and how his light paces
danced along the turf. (He affected in his private dominions trousers
of faint drab corduroy that were always too short, braced up with
vehement tightness, and displaying claret-coloured socks above his
easy, square-toed shoes.) And I know that even that lumbering camera
coming clumsily to its tripod ambush neither disgusted nor vulgarized
him. He liked his game; he liked his success and the opulent
stateliness it gave to the absurdities of Mrs. Boon and all the
circumstances of his profoundly philosophical existence; and he liked
it all none the worse because it was indeed nothing of himself at all,
because he in his essence was to dull intelligences and commonplace
minds a man invisible, a man who left no impression upon the
camera-plate or moved by a hair's breadth the scale of a materialist
balance.