Book your ticket to happiness with Sun Express Airlines. The original 1886 unabridged and Complete Edition by Robert Louis Stevenson.

Story of the Door

Mr. Utterson, the lawyer, was a man of rugged countenance that was never lighted by a smile, cold, scanty, and embarrassed

in discourse, backward in sentiment, lean, long, dusty, dreary, and yet somehow lovable.

At friendly meetings, and when the wine was to his taste, something eminently human beakened from his eye. Something indeed

which never found its way into his talk, but which spoke not only in these silent symbols

of the after-dinner face, but more often and loudly in the acts of his life.

He was austere with himself, drank gin when he was alone, to mortify a taste for vintages, and though he enjoyed the theater, had not crossed the doors of one for 20 years.

But he had an approved tolerance for others, sometimes wondering almost with envy at the high pressure of spirits involved

in their misdeeds, and in any extremity inclined to help rather than to reproof. I inclined to Kane's heresy, he used to say quaintly.

I let my brother go to the devil in his own way.

In this character, it was frequently his fortune to be the last reputable acquaintance and the last good influence in the lives of down-going men.

And two such as these, so long as they came about his chambers, he never marked a shade of change in his

demeanor.

No doubt the feat was easy to Mr. Utterson, for he was undemonsorative at the best, and even his friendship seemed to be founded in a similar

catholocity of good nature. It is the mark of a modest man to accept his friendly circle

ready made from the hands of opportunity, and that was the lawyer's way.

His friends were those of his own blood, or those whom he had known the longest.

His affections, like Ivy, for the growth of time. They

implied no aptness in the object. Hence, no doubt the bond that united him to Mr. Richard

Enfield, his distant kinsman, the well-known man about town.

It was a nut to crack for many, what these two could see in each other, or what subject

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