It was a beautiful smile worthy of a better cause.

It was a smile which made one pause to wonder what could have been the original disposition of the Disagreeable Man before ill-health had cut him off from the affairs of active life.

Was he happy or unhappy?
It was not known.

He gave no sign of either the one state or the other.

He always looked very ill, but he did not seem to get worse.
He had never been known to make the faintest allusion to his own health.
He never "smoked" his thermometer in public; and this was the more remarkable in an hotel where people would even leave off a conversation and say: "Excuse me, Sir or Madam, I must now take my temperature.