There was George, throwing away in hideous sloth the inestimable gift of time; his valuable life, every second of which he would have to account for hereafter, passing away from him, unused.... sprawling there, sunk in soul-clogging oblivion.

The speaker’s tone is mock-moralistic: George’s idleness is described in the inflated language of sermon and self-improvement tract (“inestimable gift of time,” “account for hereafter”). Jerome’s comedy often works by applying grand ethical rhetoric to petty domestic scenes, exposing how easily we dramatize ordinary laziness into a cosmic failing. The piling up of condemnatory adjectives (“hideous,” “soul-clogging”) and the image of “sprawling” in “oblivion” suggest not just wasted hours but a kind of self-induced numbness—time slipping away unnoticed. The passage satirizes both the idle character and the narrator’s own tendency to overstate, turning a commonplace moment into a humorous indictment of procrastination.