Page:The Dial (Volume 68).djvu/66

48 anyhow, in their presence, Digby could not utter a sound. In fact, their and life's refusal to take any notice of him had become a joke to which he attached all that he was capable of in the way of religious worship. When people discussed him, which was seldom, they said that he had a sense of humour.

He had a little brown moustache and absurd steady brown eyes, and he was always good-natured, never speaking unkindly of anyone and not knowing enough of what was going on about him to carry tales or gossip. It was positively indecent how people flirted in his presence. He saw nothing, because everything was too quick for him.

No woman ever decided that he ought to be married until Stella met him, and Stella made up her mind at once. She was young enough to find everybody as charming as herself, and she found Digby perfectly delightful. She saw at once that he suffered from an excessive slowness and keyed herself down to him, took the most touching pains to reveal to him what was going on in the life about them, and interpreted for him the people in the house where they were staying by means of her brilliant gift of caricature. When their characters were distorted and blown out to grotesque proportions, he could see them and laughed till he cried at Stella's sallies. In return, for the benefit of the house-party, she dressed him up and turned him into a caricature of himself at which they laughed until they cried and said that dear Mr. Tissand had such a sense of humour.

Stella was like a dancing sprite of mischief. She was eighteen, very young at that, most slender, most graceful, pale, and full of a childish dignity, and to Digby, dressed up as he was one-night in woman's clothes, there came a moment of revelation. She was the first human being he had ever seen. He smiled all over from top to toe and she seemed to him a better joke even than himself and all the worship that for years had been centred upon the joke of himself went out to her. From that moment on he knew nothing at all except that there was a moon and some pine trees and Stella in blue and himself babbling of love and beauty and Stella's lips, and her hands were in his and he was kissing them and somehow she seemed immensely large and her face was very remote, very lovely, with her head thrown back and a puzzled expression of pain in her eyes. She said nothing and he went on kissing her hands, long-fingered and