It appeared that the stranger, who might be about Settembrini’s age, was a housemate of his, the other tenant of Lukaçek the ladies’ tailor. His name, so the young people understood, was Naphta. He was small and thin, clean-shaven, and of such piercing, one might almost say corrosive ugliness as fairly to astonish the cousins. Everything about him was sharp: the hooked nose dominating his face, the narrow, pursed mouth, the thick, bevelled lenses of his glasses in their light frame, behind which were a pair of pale-grey eyes—even the silence he preserved, which suggested that when he broke it,
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