X.
The Vicar of Renton. He wanted to see her.
Mamma had left her in the room with him, going out with an air of self-conscious connivance.
Mr. Spencer Rollitt. Hard and handsome. Large face, square-cut, clean-shaved, bare of any accent except its eyebrows, its mouth a thin straight line hardly visible in its sunburn. Small blue eyes standing still in the sunburn, hard and cold.
When Mr. Rollitt wanted to express heartiness he had to fall back on gesture, on the sudden flash of white teeth; he drew in his breath, sharply, between the straight, close lips, with a sound: "Fivv-vv!"
She watched him. Under his small handsome nose his mouth and chin together made one steep, straight line. This lower face, flat and naked, without lips, stretched like another forehead. At the top of the real forehead, where his hat had saved his skin, a straight band, white, like a scar. Yet Mr. Spencer Rollitt's hair curled and clustered out at the back of his head in perfect innocence.
He was smiling his muscular smile, while his little hard cold eyes held her in their tight stare.
"Don't you think you would like to take a class in my Sunday School?"
"I'm afraid I wouldn't like it at all."
"Nothing to be afraid of. I should give you the infants' school."