The shaggy young man, blushing savagely to the tips of his ears and the roots of his flaming hair, made a clumsy inclination, and offered the large red paw to Mademoiselle, who gravely inspected it, drawing down her upper lip, folding her own infinitesimal hands before her narrow waist, but made no movement to take it.
"He has angry eyes, with curious amber taches in them, ..." she thought. "And he looks dusty as a voyager after a long travel.... Not bien tenu as a gentleman should be.... Living with Germans in Germany—he has become indifferent to the petits soins of the toilet. I would put the hand in the fire rather than tell Monica!—but, for me, I find him horrible. What is he saying? One would expect from a being so clumsy and so shaggy, not merely speech, but a roar!"
Yet the voice was fresh and rather pleasant, as he replied to Monica's interested questions. Had he had a good journey? ... How long had he been in London? ... Three days, and never let her know? ... Why not? ... Had he dined early, or lunched, and if not—he had been understood to mumble a negative,—would he not have something now? Tea and sandwiches—Sister Boniface would cut the latter in a minute. It was only three o'clock. Benediction wasn't until four—there would be heaps of time....
The mumbled refusals grew faint. Monica smiled her triumph. Intent on hospitality she hurried out of the parlor, saying with a backward glance, and a smile halved between sulky Carolan and somber Juliette: "Sit down!—talk to each other ... I'll soon be back again!..."
But the sound of the closing door smote the shaggy youth with a dumb palsy and transformed Mademoiselle de Bayard into the semblance of a large mechanical doll in black merino.
"Stiff, pale, proud little creature!" Carolan mentally termed her. It occurred to him that, attired in a brocade Court dress over a hooped farthingale, crowned with a wig of stiffened ringlets adorned with lace and ribbons and diamond powder, with a fan in one of those rigid little hands, she might have sat to Velasquez as a child Infanta. Or, upholstered and decked in Moorish finery, posed as one of the female midgets in the royal group of the Familia. Whatever Velasquez might have thought, she was priggish, prudish, dull, doltish.... Obstinate, too, with that long, deeply-channeled upper lip. And how persistently she kept those long, thick, uncurling lashes down. One wondered rather what might be the color of the eyes so concealed? Black or brown? Or—one had had a gleam of blue when for an instant she had looked at one. Nobody cared—but perhaps they were blue?
She made no movement to sit down, nor did she indicate a desire that he should seat himself. She flickered her somber eyelids for an instant, and the eyes seemed inky-black. Burnt holes in a blanket, the observer brutally termed them, lifting his mental gaze to the china-blue orbs of his ideal, the colossal Britomart-Kriemhilde-Brünhilde-Isolde.
In contempt of the prim puppet in the black merino he found himself adding inches to his loved one's height. Or perhaps it was to keep himself from madly shouting to Monica to tell them to hurry up with that tray....
When you have pawned your jacket and waistcoat for two-and-eightpence early on Wednesday, and have dined on a sausage and mashed for threepence, supped on a drink of water from a pump in a livery-stable yard.... When the bed at a coffee-house has cost you a shilling, breakfast of burned-bread coffee and roll, threepence, and you have spent twopence on a paper collar, your remaining capital stands at a shilling, and by three o'clock on Thursday, if you have not ventured to break into this, you are beginning to return to the savage of the Earlier Stone Age. Who, supposing his neighbor to be gnawing a lump of gristle when his own stomach was clamorous, dropped in upon the banquet armed with a flint axe, and possessed himself of the coveted bonne-bouche.
P. C. Breagh was frankly astonished at the savage voracity of his own impulses. It did not occur to him that his nerves—he had always jeered at men who had talked of their nerves—had sustained a tremendous shock, and that this was the inevitable reaction. His laboriously crammed scientific knowledge had never yet been called upon to account for his own bodily sensations—unless in the case of a jammer headache—diagnosed as the result of too many beers overnight. At any rate he was not hungry now,—and the room with its stiff row of chairs, its high-molded ceiling, its dingy blue distempered walls, hung with engravings of Popes and Cardinals, Roman views, and Scriptural oil-paintings, began to heave and surge like the decks of the evil-smelling, second-rate passenger-steamer that had brought him third-class from Ostend. He thought of that old man with the shattered skull sprawling among his bloody papers, and knew that in another moment he should—horror of horrors! despite the presence of yonder speechless Immobility in the fiddle-bodied black frock and medaled blue neck ribbon—either faint or be violently sick.