m
the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their
mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his
indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly
inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this
contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main
physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung
and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a
suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr.
Bender--though without the appearance consequent in the latter's case,
that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other
exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so
superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently
under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out
some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of
this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed
to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with
it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another
and no less refined a speculation--the question of whether the surest
seat of his good looks mightn't after all be his high, fair, if somewhat
narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after
a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after
they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. "I
haven't forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak
occasion."

"Bleak do you call it?" she laughed. "Why I found it, rather,
tropical--'lush.' My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of
the White City."

"Then you made it doubtless bleak for _him_, let us say. _I_ couldn't
let you alone, I remember, about _this_--it was like a shipwrecked
signal to a sail on the horizon." "This" obviously meant for the young
man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be
conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye--and much more
than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he
broke--characteristically, you would have been sure--into a great free
gaiety of recognition.

"Oh, we've nothing particular in the hall," Lady Grace amiably objected.

"Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I'm an ogre," he said--"before a
new and rare feast!"

She happily too