O Médico e o Monstro

Mr. Utterson the lawyer was a man with a hard, serious face that never smiled. He spoke little, and coldly. He was tall, thin, dusty and dull, and yet somehow people loved him. At dinner with friends, when the wine was good, something warm and very human shone in his eyes. It never came out in his talk, but it showed clearly in the things he did. He was strict with himself, but patient with other people. When a friend was in trouble, he preferred to help rather than to blame. "I let my brother go to the devil in his own way," he used to say. Because of this, he was often the last respectable friend of men who were falling into ruin.

His friends were mostly relatives, or men he had known for a very long time. One of them was Mr. Richard Enfield, a distant cousin and a well-known man about town. Nobody could understand what the two men saw in each other. They took a long walk together every Sunday, and people who met them said that they never spoke and looked terribly bored. And yet both men valued these walks more than anything else in the week.