Page:The Sense of the Past (London, W. Collins Sons & Co., 1917).djvu/155

 her few words say to himself that he had never in all his days before so much as heard personal speech, and wonder in consequence what such a speaker would make of his own. The marvel was for the moment that with her handsome hard face brightened up for him not less clearly than a badge of importance, on occasion laid by, is judiciously polished for wearing, she should expose her sensibility, or in other words her social surface, to what his native expression might have at the best to treat it to. The marvel was indeed that, borrowing as she did he could scarce have said what air of authority, verily of high female office, from her rich-looking black attire, she determined in him even before he had spoken an inward gasp of confession. "I'm a rank barbarian, yes: she must, oh she must, take me for that!"—he put this to himself at that instant with a kind of plea for his greater ease. It came to him that since he couldn't possibly succeed with her as a fine gentleman—even though, so oddly, he appeared to have succeeded as such with her daughter—his advantage would be in some quite other wild grace, on which therefore he must desperately throw himself.

However, she was herself an apparition of such force that the question of his own luck missed application and he but stared at her lost, and yet again lost, in that reflection that yes, absolutely yes, no approach to such a quality of tone as she 141