, lean, confused,
confusing young man, with a bad complexion and large protrusive teeth. He
bore in its most indelible pressure the postmark, as it were, of Oxford,
and as soon as he opened his mouth I perceived, in addition to a
remarkable revelation of gums, that the text of the queer communication
matched the registered envelope. He was full of refinements and angles,
of dreary and distinguished knowledge. Of his unconscious drollery his
dress freely partook; it seemed, from the gold ring into which his red
necktie was passed to the square toe-caps of his boots, to conform with a
high sense of modernness to the fashion before the last. There were
moments when his overdone urbanity, all suggestive stammers and
interrogative quavers, made him scarcely intelligible; but I felt him to
be a gentleman and I liked the honesty of his errand and the expression
of his good green eyes.

As a worshipper at the shrine of beauty, however, he needed explaining,
especially when I found he had no acquaintance with my brilliant model;
had on the mere evidence of my picture taken, as he said, a tremendous
fancy to her looks. I ought doubtless to have been humiliated by the
simplicity of his judgment of them, a judgment for which the rendering
was lost in the subject, quite leaving out the element of art. He was
like the innocent reader for whom the story is "really true" and the
author a negligible quantity. He had come to me only because he wanted
to purchase, and I remember being so amused at his attitude, which I had
never seen equally marked in a person of education, that I asked him why,
for the sort of enjoyment he desired, it wouldn't be more to the point to
deal directly with the lady. He stared and blushed at this; the idea
clearly alarmed him. He was an extraordinary case--personally so modest
that I could see it had never occurred to him. He had fallen in love
with a painted sign and seemed content just to dream of what it stood
for. He was the young prince in the legend or the comedy who loses his
heart to the miniature of the princess beyond seas. Until I knew him
better this puzzled me much--the link was so missing between his
sensibility and his type. He was of course bewildered by my sketches,
which implied in the beholder some sense of intention and quality; but
for one of them, a comparative failure, he ended by conceiving a
preference so arbitrary and so lively that, taking no second look at the
others,