"No," said Roger. "Is she here?"
"Yes," said the other. "I believe she is. Awfully well the old fellow looks, doesn't he? I met him in Paris in 1890."
They talked animatedly for ten minutes about the prospects of French literature as compared with our own. Presently the little man caught sight of his wife. He nodded to Roger and passed on. Roger could not remember that he had ever seen him before.
He looked about for some one with whom to talk. A couple of novelists stood on the opposite side of the room talking to a girl. There was not much chance of getting to them. He looked to his left hand, where some of the waste of the party had been drifted by the tide. He did not know any of the people there. He was struck by the appearance of a young man who stood near the wall, watching the scene with an interest which was half contemptuous. The man was, perhaps, thirty years of age. What struck Roger about him was the strange yellowness of his face. The face looked as though it had been varnished with a clear amber varnish. The skin near the eyes was puckered into crows' feet. The brow was wrinkled and seamed. The rest of the face had the leanness and tightness of one who has lived much in unhealthy parts of the tropics. He was a big man, though as lean as a rake. Roger judged from his bearing that he had been a soldier; yet there was a touch of the doctor about him, too. His eyes had the direct questioning look of one always alert to note small symptoms, and to find the truth of facts through evasions and deceits. His hands were large, capable, clinical hands, with long, supple, sensitive fingers, broad at the tips. The mouth was good-humoured, but marred by the scar of a cut at the left corner.
Presently the man walked up to Roger with the inimitable easy grace which is in the movements of men who live much in the open.
"Excuse me," he said; "but who is the poet in the middle there?"
"Jerome Mongeron," said Roger.
"Thanks," said the man, retiring.
Roger noticed that the man's eyes were more bloodshot than any eyes he had ever seen. Soon after that Roger saw him lead an elderly lady, evidently his mother, out of the room. As he felt that he had bored himself sufficiently in homage to the man of intellect, he too slipped away as soon as he could.
The night following he dined with Mrs. Heseltine. She was an elderly lady, fragile-looking, but very beautiful, with that autumnal beauty which comes with the beginning greyness of the hair. Her face had the fineness of race in it. Looking at her, one saw that all the unwanted, unlovely elements had been bred away, by conscious selection, in many generations of Fawcetts. Her face had that simple refinement of feature which one sees in the women's faces in Holbein's drawing of Sir Thomas More's family. Only in Mrs. Heseltine the striving for rightness and fineness had been pushed a little too far at the expense of the bodily structure. There was a pathetic drooping of the mouth's corners, and a wild-bird look in the eye which told of physical weakness very bravely borne. Her husband was a brain specialist.