Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 1 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/57

 random, for he failed to catch it again in the boyish candour of the visitor's talk. Hudson was a tall slim youth, with a singularly mobile and intelligent face. Rowland was struck at first only with its responsive vivacity, but it had presently affected him as full of a beauty of its own. The features were admirably chiselled and finished, and a frank smile played over them as gracefully as a breeze among flowers. The fault of the young man's whole structure was an excessive want of breadth. The forehead, though high and brave, was narrow; the jaw and the shoulders were narrow, and the result was an air of insufficient physical substance. But Mallet afterwards learned that this fair and slender stripling could draw upon a fund of nervous force outlasting and outwearying the endurance of sturdier temperaments. And certainly there was life enough in his eye to furnish an immortality. It was a generous dark grey eye, subject to an intermittent kindling glow which would have made a ruder visage striking, and which gave at times to Hudson's harmonious face an altogether extraordinary beauty. There was to Rowland's sympathetic sense a slightly pitiful disparity between the young sculptor's distinguished mask and the shabby gentility of his costume. Arrayed for a rural visit, a visit to a pretty woman, he was clad from head to foot in a white linen suit which had never been remarkable for the felicity of its cut and which had now quite lost its vivifying and redeeming crispness. He wore a bright red cravat, passed through a ring altogether too splendid to be valuable; he pulled and twisted, 23