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124 shapes of old Dutch candlesticks; and though many of his fellow-country people thought him very "affected," he always seemed to me the least pretentious of men. He never read the newspapers for their politics, and didn't pretend to: he read them only for their lists of auction-sales. I had a great kindness for him, he seemed to me such a pure-minded mortal, sitting there in his innocent company of Dresden shepherdesses and beauties whose smiles were stippled on the lids of snuff-boxes. There is always something agreeable in a man who is a perfect example of a type; and Sanguinetti was all of one piece. He was the perfect authority upon pretty things.

He kept looking at the window, as I have said, and it required no great shrewdness to guess that his thoughts had stepped out of it and were hovering in front of the hairdresser's étalage. I was inclined to humor his enthusiasm, for it amused me to see a man who had hitherto found a pink-faced lady on a china plate a sufficiently substantial object of invocation, led captive by a charmer who would, as the phrase is, have something to say for herself.

"Shouldn't you like to have a closer view of her?" I asked with a sympathetic smile.

He glanced at me and blushed again: That lovely creature?"