Still holding the pliers, Vankirk cocked his head to one side, examining me with a keenness most disconcerting. After a moment, he shook his head, a quizzical expression playing across his countenance. "Extraordinary indeed," he murmured.
"Why say you that, sir, when I-?"
I had scarcely begun the question ere the tooth-drawer raised a hand, quelling my utterance before it could be well born. "Extraordinary in that you are, to all appearances, a changed man," he said.
"Why, so I am-I am a man free from pain, for which I shall remain ever in your debt, figuratively if not financially," I said.
"Our financial arrangements are satisfactory in the highest degree," Vankirk said. "By every account reaching my ear, you are and have always been a man of the nicest scrupulosity in respect to money, and in this you seem to have altered not by the smallest jot or tittle; not even by the proverbial iota, smaller than either. But your present style-how shall I say it?-differs somewhat from that which I observed in you a fortnight previously. And, as the illustrious Buffon (not to be confused with any of our present illustrious buffoons) so justly remarked, ‘Le style c’est l’homme mкme.’ I trust you would agree?"
"How could any man disagree with such a sage observation?" I returned. "As an apologia, however, I must remind you that my faculties at the time of our last encounter were more than a little deranged by the pain of which you so skillfully relieved me."