So the struggle has gone on. Sometimes it has been a wrought iron tripod with a subtle tendency to upset in certain directions; sometimes a coal-box; once even the noisy old coal-box of japanned tin, making more noise than a Salvation Army service, and strangely decorated with "art" enamels, had a turn. At present Euphemia is enduring a walnut "casket," that since its first week of office has displayed an increasing indisposition to shut. But things cannot stay like this. The worry and anxiety and vexation, Euphemia declares, are making her old before her time. A delicate woman should not be left alone to struggle against brazen monsters. A closed gas stove is happily impossible, but the husband of the household is threatened with one of those beastly sham fires, wherein gas jets flare among firebrick--a mechanical fire without vitality or variety, that never dances nor crackles nor blazes, a monotonous horror, a fire you cannot poke. That is what it will certainly come to if the problem remains unsolved.
Frankly, I detest this Bagarrow. Yet it is quite generally conceded that Bagarrow is a very well-meaning fellow. But the trouble is to understand him. To do that I have been at some pains, and yet I am still a mere theorist. An anthropometric estimate of the man fails to reveal any reason for the distinction of my aversion. He is of passable height, breadth, and density, and, save for a certain complacency of expression, I find no salient objection in his face. He has bluish eyes and a whitish skin, and average-coloured hair--none of them distinctly indictable possessions. It is something in his interior and unseen mechanism, I think, that must be wrong; some internal lesion that finds expression in his acts.
His mental operations, indeed, were at first as inconceivable to me as a crab's or a cockchafer's. That is where all the trouble came in. For that reason alone they fascinated me and aggrieved me. From the conditions of our acquaintance--we were colleagues--I had to study him with some thoroughness, observing him under these circumstances and those. I have, by the bye, sometimes wondered idly how he would react to alcohol--a fluid he avoids. It would, I am sure, be an entirely novel and remarkable kind of Drunk, and I am also certain it would be an offensive one. But I can't imagine it; I have no data. I could as soon evolve from my inner consciousness an intoxicated giraffe. But, as I say, this interesting experience has hitherto been denied me.