Bepenciled

At the back — here get a good grip on your nervous centers — stands a double geared piece of infamy, bespattered with filth, becut with obscenity, bechalked with fiendish coarseness, and bepenciled with lewdness from the journals of the infernal regions.

Here are the yellow and bepenciled Bach Preludes and Fugues, the precious 'forty-eight'; here are the Beethoven Sonatas, every bar of which is familiar; here are — yes, the Mozart, Schubert, and Schumann Sonatas [you notice that I am beginning to bracket the batches]; here are Mendelssohn's works, highly glazed as to technical surface, pretty as to sentiment, Bach seen through the lorgnette of a refined, thin, narrow nature.

But while Ehrlich shouted at his assistants—always in a cheery, “let's keep at it” sort of way, with scientific papers stuffed in his lab coat pockets and laboratory shelves askew with bright bottles of dyes and “bepenciled and dogeared chemical journals”—Schilling kept to himself, and was tidier, subdued, and less interested in the potential of his young assistants.