Weatherbeatenness

This had been during the hectic Monday, and Stein's only memory of his visitor was of a middle-aged man, whose cherubic rotundity bespoke the Turkish bath, whose modest suit murmured Brooks Brothers, whose lobster-red head was fringed with a fright-wig effect of wispy white hair, whose ersatz-red face reminded one of a spurious antique, a face vaguely Scotch or Irish, vaguely crinkly, and bearing about it an atmosphere of artificially induced weatherbeatenness.

We obviously have no way of knowing what – assuming the “actions" to be as described – the islanders were in fact astonished by: Perhaps by the weatherbeatenness, or the hair on the hands. Most likely they were just assuring themselves that there really was some skin, however little, on these gigantic wingless parrot-men with their ridiculous plumage.

Every possible facial type seemed to be represented among the men sitting and shouting on the benches, clean-shaven, sideboarded or bearded; every hue from workmens'^([sic]) nut-brown weatherbeatenness to the pallor of late-stage tuberculosis; every gradation from sobriety to near-paralytic drunkenness.