"A trifle irresistible of course," Cissy broke in—"through their being, in their charming form, of the happy Latin model; extremely like my own, be so good as to notice for once in your life, and not like the usual Anglo-Saxon fangs. You're simply describing, you know," she added, "about as gorgeous a being as one could wish to see."
"It's not I who am describing him—it's you, love; and ever so delightfully." With which, in consistency with that, he himself put a question. "What does it come to, by the way, in the sense of a moustache? Does he, or doesn't he after all, wear one? It's odd I shouldn't remember, but what does the photograph say?"
"It seems odd indeed I shouldn't"—Cissy had a moment's brooding. She gave herself out as ashamed. "Fancy my not remembering if the photograph is moustachue!"
"It can't be then very" Horton contributed—the point was really so interesting.
"No," Cissy tried to settle, "the photograph can't be so very moustachue."
"His moustaches, I mean, if he wears 'em, can't be so very prodigious; or one could scarcely have helped noticing, could one?"
"Certainly no one can ever have failed to notice yours—and therefore Gray's, if he has any, must indeed be very inferior. And yet he can't be shaved like a sneak-thief—or like all the world here," she developed; "for I won't have him with nothing at all any more than I'll have him with anything prodigious, as you say; which is worse than nothing. When I say I won't have him with nothing," she explained, "I mean I won't have him subject to the so universally and stupidly applied American law that every man's face without exception shall be scraped as clean, as glabre, as a fish's—which it makes so many of them so much resemble. I won't have him so," she said, "because I won't have him so idiotically gregarious and without that sense of differences in things, and of their relations and suitabilities, which such exhibitions make one so ache for. If he's gregarious to that sort of tune we must renounce our idea—that is you must drop yours—of my working myself up to snatch him from the arms of Rosanna. I must believe in him, for that, I must see him at least in my own way," she pursued; "believing in myself, or even believing in you, is a comparative detail. I won't have him bristle with horrid demagogic notes. I shouldn't be able to act a scrap on that basis."
It was as if what she said had for him the interest at once of the most intimate and the most enlarged application; it was in fact as if she alone in all the world could touch him in such fine ways—could amuse him, could verily instruct him, to anything like such a tune. "It seems peculiarly a question of bristles if it all depends on his moustache. Our suspense as to that, however, needn't so much ravage us," Haughty added, "when we remember that Davey, who, you tell me, will by this time have seen him, can settle the question for us as soon as we meet at dinner. It will by the same stroke then settle that of the witchcraft which has according to your theory so bedevilled poor dear Rosanna's sensibility—leading it such a dance, I mean, and giving such an empire to certain special items of our friend's 'personality,' that the connection was practically immediate with his brilliant status."
III
Horton, looking at his watch, had got up as he spoke—which Cissy at once also did under this recall of the lapse of their precious minutes. There was a point, however, left for her to make; which she did with the remark that the item they had been discussing in particular couldn't have been by itself the force that had set their young woman originally in motion, inasmuch as Gray wouldn't have had a moustache when a small boy or whatever, and as since that young condition, she understood, Rosanna hadn't again seen him. A proposition to which Haughty's assent was to remain vague, merged as it suddenly became in the cry of "Hello, here he is!" and a prompt gay brandish of arms up at their host Bradham, arrayed for the evening, white-waistcoated and buttonholed, robustly erect on an overlooking ledge and explaining his presence, from the moment it was thus observed, by calling down that Gussy had sent him to see if she wasn't to expect them at dinner. It was practically a summons to Cissy, as the girl easily recognised, to leave herself at least ten minutes to dress decently—in spite of the importance of which she so challenged Davey on another score that, as a consequence, the good gorgeous man, who shone with every effect of the bath and every resource of the toilet, had within the pair of minutes picked out such easiest patent-leather steps as would enable him to convict the companions of a shameless dawdle. She had had time to articulate for Horton's benefit, with no more than due distinctness, that he must have seen them, and Horton had as quickly found the right note and the right wit for the simple reassurance "Oh Davey——!" As occupants of a place of procrastination that they only were not such fools as to leave unhaunted they frankly received their visitor, any impulse in whom to sprinkle stale banter on their search for solitude would have been forestalled, even had it been supposable of so perfect a man of the world, by the instant action of his younger guest's strategic curiosity.