Cissy weighed the question. "We've seen surely what she has been carried away enough to do."
"She has had other reasons—independent of headlong passion. And remember," he further argued—"if you impute to her a high degree of that sort of sensibility—how perfectly proof she was to my physical attractions, which I declare to you without scruple leave the very brightest you may discover in Gray completely in the shade."
Again his companion considered. "Of course you're dazzlingly handsome; but are you, my dear, after all—I mean in appearance—so very interesting?"
The inquiry was so sincere that it could be met but in the same spirit. "Didn't you then find me so from the first minute you ever looked at me?"
"We're not talking of me," she returned, "but of people who happen to have been subjects less predestined and victims less abject. What," she then at once went on, "is Gray's appearance 'anyway'? Is he black, to begin with, or white, or betwixt and between? Is he little or big or neither one thing or t'other? Is he fat or thin or of 'medium weight'? There are always such lots to be told about people, and never a creature in all the wide world to tell. Even Mr. Northover, when I come to think of it, never mentioned is size.
"Well, you wouldn't mention it," Horton amiably argued. The appeal, he showed withal, stirred him to certain recoveries. "And I should call him black—black as to his straight thick hair, which I see rather distinctively 'slick' and soigné—the hair of a good little boy who never played at things that got it tumbled. No, he's only very middling tall; in fact so very middling," Haughty made out, "that it probably comes to his being rather short. But he has neither a hump nor a limp, no marked physical deformity of any sort; has in fact a kind of futile fidgetty quickness which suggests the little man, and the nervous and the active and the ready; the ready, I mean, for anything in the way of interest and talk—given that the matter isn't too big for him. The 'active,' I say, though at the same time," he noted, "I ask myself what the deuce the activity will have been about."
The girl took in these impressions to the effect of desiring still more of them. "Doesn't he happen then to have eyes and things?"
"Oh yes"—Horton bethought himself—"lots and lots of eyes, though not perhaps so many of other things. Good eyes, fine eyes, in fact I think anything whatever you may require in the way of eyes."
"Then clearly they're not 'black': I never require black ones," she said, "in any conceivable connection: his eyes—blue-grey, or grey-blue, whichever you may call it, and far and away the most charming kind when one doesn't happen to be looking into your glorious green ones—his satisfactory eyes are what will more than anything else have done the business. They'll have done it so," she went on, "that if he isn't red in the face, which I defy him to be, his features don't particularly matter—though there's not the least reason either why he should have mean or common ones. In fact he hasn't them in the photograph, and what are photographs, the wretched things, but the very truth of life?"
"He's not red in the face," Haughty was able to state—"I think of him rather as of a pale, very pale, clean brown; and entirely unaddicted," he felt sure, "to flushing or blushing. What I do sort of remember in the feature way is that his teeth though good, fortunately, as they're shown a good deal, are rather too small and square; for a man's, that is, so that they make his smile a trifle——"