My hilarity may have struck my interlocutress as excessive, but I confess it broke out afresh. Had she acted only in obedience to this singular plea, so characteristic, on Mrs. Saltram's part, of what was irritating in the narrowness of that lady's point of view? “Mrs. Saltram,” I explained, “undervalues him where he is strongest, so that, to make up for it perhaps, she overpraises him where he's weak. He's not, assuredly, superficially attractive; he's middle-aged, fat, featureless save for his great eyes.”
“Yes, his great eyes,” said my young lady attentively. She had evidently heard all about them.
“They're tragic and splendid—lights on a dangerous coast. But he moves badly and dresses worse, and altogether he's strange to behold.”
My companion appeared to reflect on this, and after a moment she inquired: “Do you call him a real gentleman?”
I started slightly at the question, for I had a sense of recognising it: George Gravener, years before that first flushed night, had put me face to face with it. It had embarrassed me then, but it didn't embarrass me now, for I had lived with it and overcome it and disposed of it. “A real gentleman? Decidedly not!”
My promptitude surprised her a little, but I quickly felt that it was not to Gravener I was now talking. “Do you say that because he's—what do you call it in England?—of humble extraction?”
“Not a bit. His father was a country schoolmaster and his mother the widow of a sexton, but that has nothing to do with it. I say it simply because I know him well.”
“But isn't it an awful drawback?”
“Awful—quite awful.”
“I mean, isn't it positively fatal?”