Owen would laugh, and admit that, though he would
have been glad enough to take his young fair love without dower and
plenishing, it was pleasant enough to know that his wife would have an
independent fortune of her own. It was one of David's best jokes that Owen
was marrying Mildred for her money. David's ideas of humour were crude and
elemental. On the other hand, his manners were admirable, and his physical
beauty perfect of its type, though men and women turned oftenest to look
at the younger brother, whom the women called "plain, but so interesting,"
and the men "an uncommonly attractive sort of fellow, and as clever as
they make them." When the great crash came Owen Saxham, M.D., F.R.C.S.,
was about twenty-nine.

Do you care for a description of the man at his prime?

He was probably five feet ten in height, but his scholar's stoop robbed
him of an inch or more. The great breadth of the slightly-bowed shoulders,
the immense depth and thickness of the chest, gave his upper figure a
false air of clumsiness. His arms were long and powerful, terminating in
strong, supple, white hands, the hands of the skilled surgical operator;
his thick, smooth, opaque, white skin covered an admirable structure of
bone, knit with tough muscles, clothed with healthful flesh. One noticed,
seeing him walk, that his legs were bowed a little, because he had been
accustomed to the saddle from earliest childhood, though he rode but
seldom now, and one saw also that his small muscular feet gripped the
ground vigorously, through the glove-thin boots he liked to wear. He
showed no tendency to dandyism. His loosely-cut suits of fine, silky black
cloth were invariably of the same fashion. In abhorring jewellery, in
preferring white cashmere shirts, and strictly limiting the amount of
starch in the thin linen cuffs and collars, perhaps he showed a tendency
to faddism. David told him that he dressed himself like a septuagenarian
Professor. Mildred would have preferred dear Owen to pay a little more
attention to style and cut, and all that, though one did not, of course,
expect a man of science to look like a man of fashion. One couldn't have
everything, at least, not in this world....

She said that one day, standing beside the writing-table in the Chilworth
Street study, with David's portrait in her hand. It usually stood there,
in a silver frame--a coloured photograph of a young man of thirty, stupid,
and beautiful as the Praxitelean Hermes, r