"He looks a domineering man!" she said. "I hope you're not like him."
Jack didn't feel at all like him. Mary turned over, and they beheld two young ladies of the Victorian period. Somebody had marked a cross, in ink, over the head of one of the young ladies. They must be his own Aunts, both of them many years older than his own mother, who was a late arrival.
"Do you think that was his mother?" said Mary, looking up at Jack, who stood at her side. "She was beautiful."
Jack studied the photograph of the young woman. She looked like nobody's mother on earth, with her hair curiously rolled and curled, and a great dress flouncing round her. And her beauty was so photographic and abstract, he merely gazed seeking for it.
But Mary, looking up at him, saw his silent face in the glow of the lamp, his rather grim mouth closed ironically under his moustache, his open nostrils, and the long, steady, self-contained look of his eyes under his lashes. He was not thinking of her at all, at the moment. But his calm, rather distant, unconsciously imperious face was something quite new and startling, and rather frightening to her. She became intensely aware of his thighs standing close against her, and her heart went faint. She was afraid of him.
In agitation, she was going to turn the leaf. But he put his work-hardened hand on the page, and turned back to the first photograph.
"Look!" he said. "He——" pointing to his grandfather, "disowned her——" turning to the Aunt marked with a cross, "——and she died an outcast, in misery, and her son burrowed here, half crazy. Yet their two faces are rather alike. Gran Ellis told me about them."
Mary studied them.
"They are both a bit like yours," she said, "their faces."
"Mine!" he exclaimed. "Oh no! I look like my father's family."