first as very handsome.
The gentleman might still be called young, and his features were
regular: he had a plentiful, fair moustache that curled up at the ends,
a brilliant, gallant, almost adventurous air, and a big shining
breastpin in the middle of his shirt. He appeared a fine satisfied soul,
and Lyon perceived that wherever he rested his friendly eye there fell
an influence as pleasant as the September sun--as if he could make
grapes and pears or even human affection ripen by looking at them. What
was odd in him was a certain mixture of the correct and the extravagant:
as if he were an adventurer imitating a gentleman with rare perfection
or a gentleman who had taken a fancy to go about with hidden arms. He
might have been a dethroned prince or the war-correspondent of a
newspaper: he represented both enterprise and tradition, good manners
and bad taste. Lyon at length fell into conversation with the lady
beside him--they dispensed, as he had had to dispense at dinner-parties
before, with an introduction--by asking who this personage might be.

'Oh, he's Colonel Capadose, don't you know?' Lyon didn't know and he
asked for further information. His neighbour had a sociable manner and
evidently was accustomed to quick transitions; she turned from her other
interlocutor with a methodical air, as a good cook lifts the cover of
the next saucepan. 'He has been a great deal in India--isn't he rather
celebrated?' she inquired. Lyon confessed he had never heard of him, and
she went on, 'Well, perhaps he isn't; but he says he is, and if you
think it, that's just the same, isn't it?'

'If _you_ think it?'

'I mean if he thinks it--that's just as good, I suppose.'

'Do you mean that he says that which is not?'

'Oh dear, no--because I never know. He is exceedingly clever and
amusing--quite the cleverest person in the house, unless indeed you are
more so. But that I can't tell yet, can I? I only know about the people
I know; I think that's celebrity enough!'

'Enough for them?'

'Oh, I see you're clever. Enough for me! But I have heard of you,' the
lady went on. 'I know your pictures; I admire them. But I don't think
you look like them.'

'They are mostly portraits,' Lyon said; 'and what I usually try for is
not my own resemblance.'

'I see what you mean. But they have much more colour. And now you are
going to do some one here?'

'I have been invited to do Sir David. I'm rather disappointed at not
seeing him this e