ontrivance
showed him as unsophisticated, yet when his companion, at the top,
ushering him in, gave a touch to the quick light and, in the pleasant
ruddy room, all convenience and character, had before the fire another
look at him, it was not to catch in him any protrusive angle. Mr.
Longdon was slight and neat, delicate of body and both keen and kind of
face, with black brows finely marked and thick smooth hair in which
the silver had deep shadows. He wore neither whisker nor moustache and
seemed to carry in the flicker of his quick brown eyes and the positive
sun-play of his smile even more than the equivalent of what might,
superficially or stupidly, elsewhere be missed in him; which was mass,
substance, presence--what is vulgarly called importance. He had indeed
no presence but had somehow an effect. He might almost have been a
priest if priests, as it occurred to Vanderbank, were ever such dandies.
He had at all events conclusively doubled the Cape of the years--he
would never again see fifty-five: to the warning light of that bleak
headland he presented a back sufficiently conscious. Yet though
to Vanderbank he couldn't look young he came near--strikingly and
amusingly--looking new: this after a minute appeared mainly perhaps
indeed in the perfection of his evening dress and the special smartness
of the sleeveless overcoat he had evidently had made to wear with it
and might even actually be wearing for the first time. He had talked to
Vanderbank at Mrs. Brookenham's about Beccles and Suffolk; but it was
not at Beccles nor anywhere in the county that these ornaments had been
designed. His action had already been, with however little purpose,
to present the region to his interlocutor in a favourable light.
Vanderbank, for that matter, had the kind of imagination that likes
to PLACE an object, even to the point of losing sight of it in the
conditions; he already saw the nice old nook it must have taken to keep
a man of intelligence so fresh while suffering him to remain so fine.
The product of Beccles accepted at all events a cigarette--still much
as a joke and an adventure--and looked about him as if even more pleased
than he expected. Then he broke, through his double eye-glass, into an
exclamation that was like a passing pang of envy and regret. "You young
men, you young men--!"

"Well, what about us?" Vanderbank's tone encouraged the courtesy of the
reference. "I'm not so young moreover as that comes to."

"How