Page:The man on horseback (IA manonhorseback00abdurich).pdf/53

 was the exact opposite of the German accepted and perpetrated as typical by the comic sheets, the music halls, and the weeklies with guaranteed over two and a half million circulation.

He was neither short nor plump. His hair was not honey-blond and brushed straight back from a square and stubborn forehead; there was no supercilious up-sweep of pointed, curled mustache, and his eyes were neither watery blue nor glassed in by immense, professorial spectacles. He smoked no ell-long, cherry-wood stem, china-bowl pipe, nor did he dine exclusively on such Teuton delicacies as sauerkraut, pickled herrings, liver sausage, veal kidney roast with sour gravy, and nut cake topped by whipped cream.

On the contrary, he was tall and Jean and clean-shaven, of a certain angular, feline grace; dark enough to be an Italian with a dash of Moor; polite enough to be a Frenchman of fiction, and dressed in a pronouncedly and aggressively British style. His clothes spoke of a Haymarket tailor, his neckties and socks and blazers and hats of the Burlington Arcades.

He was good-looking, even striking-looking, with his clean, trained down length of limb, his wide, supple shoulders, his narrow hips, and his long, predatory face that sloped wedge-shaped to a cleft chin.

Baron Horst von Götz-Wrede was a cosmopolite,