“So you came to see where the fascination resides? Well, you’ve seen!”
My young lady raised fine eyebrows. “Do you mean in his bad faith?”
“In the extraordinary effects of it; his possession, that is, of some quality or other that condemns us in advance to forgive him the humiliation, as I may call it, to which he has subjected us.”
“Why mine, for instance, as one of his guarantors, before you as the purchaser of a ticket.”
She let her charming gay eyes rest on me. “You don’t look humiliated a bit, and if you did I should let you off, disappointed as I am; for the mysterious quality you speak of is just the quality I came to see.”
“You don’t! You mustn’t suppose he’s good-looking,” I added.
My hilarity may have struck her 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’s 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 his great eyes—the beaux yeux for which alone we had really done it all.
“They’re tragic and splendid—lights on a dangerous coast. But he moves badly and dresses worse, and altogether he’s anything but smart.”
My companion, who appeared to reflect on this, after a moment appealed. “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? Emphatically not!”
My promptitude surprised her a little, but I quickly felt how little it was 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 school-master 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.”