The man she has elected her lord and king for evermore is a man to whom most women give a second glance.
Women like height and strength in man, and this one stands over six feet two, and has broad shoulders, and carries his brown, cropped head as haughtily as if he were a prince instead of a pauper, and what in social parlance is too awful—a detrimental.
He has large brown eyes (sleepy as a rule but quite capable of suddenly kindling into passion), set deeply under straight well defined brows, aquiline thin-cut features, firmly moulded lips, a slight moustache, and a sort of debonnair style that suits him admirably.
Altogether Carlton Conway, “jeune amoureux” at the Bagatelle Theatre, is very much worth looking at, and is just the sort a romantic girl falls down before in abject adoration.
“We must take our lives into our own hands, Zai,” he says very passionately, marking how sweet his love looks under the soft moonbeams. “We must run away, my child!”
One arm is round her slim waist, her cheek, lovelier and whiter and purer than a white rose, is against his breast, her small snowflake of a hand lies restfully in his strong clasp.
“Run away, Carl?” she asks in an awed voice. Such a frightful defiance of the convenances has never been known in the annals of the Berangers, and it sounds quite too awful in her tiny pink ears. Possibly, or rather probably, she has passed hours, delightful fleeting hours, in her own little sanctum sanctorum in Belgrave Square, picturing the pretty wedding at St. George’s or St. Peter’s, with the organ pealing out “The voice that breathed o’er Eden,” the bevy of aristocratic bridesmaids, with Gabrielle and Trixy and Baby among them, attired in cream satin and dainty lace, and overladen with baskets of Marshal Niel roses, the central and most attractive figures on the scene her Carl and herself.
It is heartrending to think of the demolition of her lovely picture.
“Run away, Zai,” Carl Conway answers impetuously, for the moonbeams are falling full on her face, deepening the lustre of the sweet grey eyes, dancing and quivering on the wealth of fair hair and making her seem if possible doubly desirable in his eyes. “If they won’t let us have our way quietly and comfortably, of course we must run away. Shall we let them part us for ever? Could you bear it, my Zai? Could you know that for the rest of our natural existence (and we may both live to a hundred) that we shall never see each other, speak to one another, kiss each other again, and live?”