Page:The Yellow Book - 02.djvu/349

Rh "So you came to see where the fascination resides? Well, you've seen!"

My young lady raised her fine eyebrows. "Do you mean in his bad faith?"

"In the extraordinary effects of it; his possession, that is, of some quality or other that condemns us in advance to forgive him the humiliation, as I may call it, to which he has subjected us."

"The humiliation?"

"Why mine, for instance, as one of his guarantors, before you as the purchaser of a ticket."

"You don't look humiliated a bit, and if you did I should let you off, disappointed as I am; for the mysterious quality you speak of is just the quality I came to see."

"Oh, you can't see it!" I exclaimed.

"How then do you get at it?"

"You don't! You musn'tmustn't [sic] suppose he's good-looking," I added.

"Why, his wife says he is!"

My hilarity may have struck my interlocutress as excessive, but I confess it broke out afresh. Had she acted only in obedience to this singular plea, so characteristic, on Mrs. Saltram's part, of what was irritating in the narrowness of that lady's point of view? "Mrs. Saltram," I explained, "undervalues him where he is strongest, so that, to make up for it perhaps, she overpraises him where he's weak. He's not, assuredly, superficially attractive; he's middle-aged, fat, featureless save for his great eyes."

"Yes, his great eyes," said my young lady attentively. She had evidently heard all about them.

"They're tragic and splendid—lights on a dangerous coast. But he moves badly and dresses worse, and altogether he's strange to behold." Rh