“No; I’m not to be put off with pretty speeches. Take them off. Please!”
Releasing her hand, he lifted off the heavy and disfiguring apparatus, and stood before her, quietly submissive to her wish. She took a quick step backward, stumbled, and thrust out a hand against the face of the giant rock for support.
“Oh!” she cried, and again, “Oh, I didn’t think you’d look like that!”
“What is it? Is there anything very wrong with me?” he asked seriously, blinking a little in the soft light.
“No, no. It isn’t that. I—I hardly know—I expected something different. Forgive me for being so—so stupid.”
In truth, Miss Polly Brewster had sustained a shock. She had become accustomed to regard her beetle man rather more in the light of a beetle than a man. In fact, the human side of him had impressed her only as a certain dim appeal to sympathy; the masculine side had simply not existed. Now it was as if he had unmasked. The visage, so grotesque and gnomish behind its mechanical apparatus, had given place to a wholly different and formidably strange face. The change all centered in the eyes. They were wide-set eyes of the clearest, steadiest, and darkest gray she had ever met; and they looked out at her from sharply angled brows with a singular clarity and calmness of regard. In their light the man’s face became instinct with character in every line. Strength was there, self-control, dignity, a glint of humor in the little wrinkles at the corner of the mouth, and, withal a sort of quiet and sturdy beauty.
She had half-turned her face from him. Now, as her gaze returned and was fixed by his, she felt a wave of blood expand her heart, rush upward into her cheeks, and press into her eyes tears of swift regret. But now she was sorry, not for him, but for herself, because he had become remote and difficult to her.
“Have I startled you?” he asked curiously. “I’ll put them back on again.”
“No, no; don’t do that!” She rallied herself to the point of laughing a little. “I’m a goose. You see, I’ve pictured you as quite different. Have you ever seen yourself in the glass with those dreadful disguises on?”
“Why, no; I don’t suppose I have,” he replied, after reflection. “After all, they’re meant for use, not for ornament.”