ence. When I turned about the
door behind him was already shut. He advanced towards me, correct,
supple, hollow-eyed, and smiling; and as to his costume ready to go out
except for the old shooting jacket which he must have affectioned
particularly, for he never lost any time in getting into it at every
opportunity. Its material was some tweed mixture; it had gone
inconceivably shabby, it was shrunk from old age, it was ragged at the
elbows; but any one could see at a glance that it had been made in London
by a celebrated tailor, by a distinguished specialist. Blunt came
towards me in all the elegance of his slimness and affirming in every
line of his face and body, in the correct set of his shoulders and the
careless freedom of his movements, the superiority, the inexpressible
superiority, the unconscious, the unmarked, the not-to-be-described, and
even not-to-be-caught, superiority of the naturally born and the
perfectly finished man of the world, over the simple young man. He was
smiling, easy, correct, perfectly delightful, fit to kill.

He had come to ask me, if I had no other engagement, to lunch with him
and his mother in about an hour's time. He did it in a most _degage_
tone. His mother had given him a surprise. The completest . . . The
foundation of his mother's psychology was her delightful unexpectedness.
She could never let things be (this in a peculiar tone which he checked
at once) and he really would take it very kindly of me if I came to break
the tete-a-tete for a while (that is if I had no other engagement. Flash
of teeth). His mother was exquisitely and tenderly absurd. She had
taken it into her head that his health was endangered in some way. And
when she took anything into her head . . . Perhaps I might find something
to say which would reassure her. His mother had two long conversations
with Mills on his passage through Paris and had heard of me (I knew how
that thick man could speak of people, he interjected ambiguously) and his
mother, with an insatiable curiosity for anything that was rare (filially
humorous accent here and a softer flash of teeth), was very anxious to
have me presented to her (courteous intonation, but no teeth). He hoped
I wouldn't mind if she treated me a little as an "interesting young man."
His mother had never got over her seventeenth year, and the manner of the
spoilt beauty of at least three counties at the back of the Carolinas.
That again got overlaid by t