Her distraction irritated him.
“Don’t sit there looking like a magazine cover. Your profile is odiously seraphic. If I’d seen it first, I’d not have given you a second thought.... That’s better.... When I compare that asking look in your eyes with the dear little wrinkles around your mouth—those dear little wrinkles——”
So long and so strangely did he continue to contemplate her that Dolores risked his displeasure by covering her face with her hands. Again he surprised her.
“Your methods are unlike those of any in the whole Well of Wantons. At times it is hard to believe the worst of you. Looking straight into your eyes, one sees——”
His pause she interrupted with an almost beseeching reminder.
“Does one—what?”
“Well, what has been your experience? Doesn’t one?”
His laugh was an insult.
Denied the eyes in whose royal purple shadows lurked “that look” which, underscored by the lines about her smileless mouth, had got on his imagination, he soon tired of the joke at her expense.
“You are a helliot for looks, no doubt of that,” he remarked crisply. “What I want to know is—can you fight?”