In the dim light she looked wonderfully young and beautiful.
In the dim light she looked wonderfully young and beautiful. The parted opera-cloak disclosed her round straight throat and the broad smooth modelling of the neck from which it rose. She seemed taller and more stately than in street-dress, and at once younger, more defenceless, more virginal. There was not enough light in the place to bring out the contrasting colors of her hair. She looked like a black-haired beauty with ivory-white skin, instead of an amber, red, and brown beauty, with rosy, brown skin. Her head, small, round, and carried very high, lent her an air of extraordinary breeding and distinction. She had no thought for the short rose-brocade train of her dinner-dress, and let it trail over the dirty floor.
"Mr. Blizzard!"
This time he answered. It sounded less like a voice than the hoarse bass croak of a very enormous bull-frog.
"Please step this way."
Her head, if anything, a little higher than ever, she walked swiftly forward right into the legless man's office.
His face was very white, swollen, it looked, and blotched with purple. The veins in his forehead looked like mountain ranges on a topographical map.
"I've only a minute," said Barbara.
He lowered his head now over his ledger, but said nothing. Then he looked up and into her face steadily, and one by one the purple blotches in his own face paled, and vanished, like the extinguishing of as many hellish lights. And then to Barbara's horror a low groan, more like a dog's than a man's, passed his tightly pressed lips, came out, and was cut short off, as if with a keen knife.
"Are you sick?" she asked, not kindly, but imperatively and with a tone, perhaps, of disgust.