Robert Louis Stevenson

“If he be Mr. Hyde,” he had thought, “I shall be Mr. Seek.”

Mr. Ut­ter­son the law­yer was a man of a rugged coun­ten­ance that was never lighted by a smile;

Hence, al­though I had now two char­ac­ters as well as two ap­pear­ances, one was wholly evil, and the other was still the old Henry Je­kyll

for there be­fore my eyes—pale and shaken, and half faint­ing, and grop­ing be­fore him with his hands, like a man re­stored from death—there stood Henry Je­kyll!

It was Hyde, after all, and Hyde alone, that was guilty.

“He is not easy to de­scribe. There is some­thing wrong with his ap­pear­ance; some­thing dis­pleas­ing, some­thing down­right de­test­able. I never saw a man I so dis­liked, and yet I scarce know why. He must be de­formed some­where; he gives a strong feel­ing of de­form­ity, al­though I couldn’t spe­cify the point.

Only on one point were they agreed; and that was the haunt­ing sense of un­ex­pressed de­form­ity with which the fu­git­ive im­pressed his be­hold­ers

­prove. “I in­cline to Cain’s heresy,” he used to say quaintly: “I let my brother go to the devil in his own way.”

Aye, it must be that; the ghost of some old sin, the can­cer of some con­cealed dis­grace: pun­ish­ment com­ing, pede claudo, years after memory has for­got­ten and self-love con­doned the fault.”

In this char­ac­ter, it was fre­quently his for­tune to be the last reput­able ac­quaint­ance and the last good in­flu­ence in the lives of down­go­ing men. And to such as these, so long as they came about his cham­bers, he never marked a shade of change in his de­mean­our.