not an idea. At
first sight, the Governor appeared merely ordinary--a tall, rugged
figure, built of good bone and muscle and sound to the core, with the
look of arrested energy which was doubtless an inheritance from the
circus ring. There was nothing impressive about him; nothing that would
cause one to turn and look back in a crowd. What struck one most was his
air of extraordinary freshness and health, of sanguine vitality. His
face was well-coloured and irregular in outline, with a high bulging
forehead and thick sandy hair which was already gray on the temples. In
the shadow his eyes did not appear remarkably fine; they seemed at the
first glance to be of an indeterminate colour--was it blue or gray?--and
there was nothing striking in their deep setting under the beetling
sandy eyebrows. All this was true; and yet while Stephen looked into
them over the Governor's outstretched hand, he told himself that they
were the most human eyes he had ever seen. Afterward, when he groped
through his vocabulary for a more accurate description, he could not
find one. There was shrewdness in Gideon Vetch's eyes; there was
friendliness; there was the blue sparkle of contagious humour--a ripple
of light that was like visible laughter--but above all there was
humanity. Though Stephen did not try to grasp the vivid impressions that
passed through his mind, he felt intuitively that he had learned to know
Gideon Vetch through his look and manner as well as he should have known
another man after weeks or months of daily intercourse. Whatever the
man's private life, whatever his political faults may have been, there
was magic in the clasp of his hand and the cordial glow of his smile.
He was always responsive; he stood always on the same level, high or
low, with his companion of the moment: he was as incapable of looking up
as he was of looking down; he was equally without reverence and without
condescension. It was the law of his nature that he should give himself
emphatically to the just and the unjust alike.

"He came home with me because I hurt my foot," Patty was saying.

Had she forgotten already, Stephen asked himself cynically, that it was
not her foot but her ankle? His suspicions returned while he looked at
her blooming face, and he hoped earnestly that she would not feel
impelled to relate any irrelevant details of the adventure. Like Gideon
Vetch on the platform she seemed incapable of withholding the smallest
fragment of a