Page:Elizabeth's Pretenders.djvu/229

216 With a smiling impertinence not lost on him, she replied, "Nothing you could— or better, nothing you would—say could make me angry, I am sure. I am not especially interested in all the models that sit to me, whether handsome or not—least of all in Colonel Wybrowe."

"That is a consolation to a man who could never be your model. Ugliness has its advantages."

"Has it?" she inquired, with a wicked air of innocence. "What are they?"

"If one has any success"—he waited to adjust the clasp of his sentence, then snapped it with—"one knows it is not due to one's exterior."

'It must be delightful to be beautiful," she said irrelevantly, as she walked vigorously along, inhaling the sharp October air. "I sometimes think I would rather be beautiful than anything."

"May I say—that is foolish? I care so little for regular rule-and-measure beauty; I remember saying so to you once before."

"I was not thinking of you. Lord Robert. Beauty is an attraction about which there can be no mistake. There are so many mistakes about other attractions."

"Such as what? Don't understand you."

"Oh, such as cleverness, or good temper, or—or—or money. All these things—I mean the belief in them—may deceive a man: beauty can't. There it is, undeniable."

"But not necessarily attractive."

"No, not necessarily. But if I were beautiful, and—had nothing else to recommend me, I should know, at least, that the man who made up to me was genuinely in love."