Page:Watch and Ward (Boston, Houghton, Osgood and Company, 1878).djvu/91

88 enjoy peculiar advantages in approaching the fair sex. The presumption is in their favor. Our business, however, is not to pick up idle reports. Hubert was, on the whole, a decidedly light weight, and yet his want of spiritual passion was by no means, in effect, a want of motive or stimulus; for the central pivot of his being continued to operate with the most noiseless precision and regularity,—the slim, erect, inflexible Ego. To the eyes of men, and especially to the eyes of women, whatever may have been the moving cause, the outer manifestation was very agreeable. If Hubert had no great firmness of faith, he had a very pretty firmness of manner. He was gentle without timidity, frank without arrogance, clever without pedantry. The common measure of clerical disallowance was reduced in his hands to the tacit protest of a generous personal purity. His appearance bore various wholesome traces of the practical lessons of his Western pastorate. This had not been to his taste; he had had to apply himself, to devote himself, to compromise with a hundred aversions. His talents had been worth less to him than he expected, and he had been obliged, as the French say, to payer de sa personne,—that person for which he entertained so delicate a respect. All this had given him a slightly jaded, overwearied look, certain to deepen his interest in feminine eyes. He had actually a couple of fine wrinkles in his seraphic forehead. He secretly rejoiced in his wrinkles. They were his crown of glory. He had suffered, he had worked, he had been bored. Now he believed in earthly compensations.

"Dear me!" he said, "can this be Nora Lambert?"

She had risen to meet him, and held out her hand with