To do this I glanced down at my copy paper, with one eyelid raised in favor of his profile. An ancestor-worshiper? Absurd! Ancestors were quite out of the question with him, I felt sure. There was something gloriously traditionless about his face and expansive frame. But his hands? Those infallible records of what has gone before?—I dropped my eyes to their normal position. His hands were good! They were big and long and brown—that shade of brownness that comes to a meerschaum pipe after it has been kissed a time or two by nicotine. And his hair was brown, too light by several shades to match with his very dark eyes, but it likely looked lighter on account of its conduct, standing up, and away, and back from his face. His complexion spoke of an early-to-bed and early-to-tub code of ethics. His nose and mouth were well in the foreground.
"You are a man who cares nothing at all for your ancestors—but you'll care a great deal for your descendants!" was the summing up I finally made of him.
At the close of the band's Hungarian Rhapsody he leaned over and whispered to me.
"Did you say the Herald?" he asked.
"Yes."
"I have had my—attention called to your paper recently," he said, in so serious a tone that I was compelled to look up and search for the smile which I felt must lurk behind it. And when I saw it there I felt reassured, and smiled in response.
"So they told me at the office," I said with great cordiality. "Is it three or four of our reporters you've thrown down your front steps?"
"Oh, I haven't got close enough to them to throw them down the steps," he disclaimed quickly. "That's one thing you have to guard against with reporters. They've got you—if they once see the whites of your eyes!"
I felt it my duty to bristle, in defense of my kind.
"Not unless your eyes talk," I said. Then, when he stared at me in uncertainty for a moment, I dropped my own eyes again, for I felt that they were proclaiming their convictions as loudly as a Hyde Park suffragette meeting.