ike an inset plaque of
turquoise; its "staircase of honour," guarded, in an ascending file, by
statues of men in armour; and then, on the _piano nobile_, its endless
chain of big, empty, silent, splendid state apartments, with their
pavements of gleaming marble, in many-coloured patterns, their painted
and gilded ceilings, tapestried walls, carved wood and moulded stucco,
their pictures, pictures, pictures, and their atmosphere of stately
desolation, their memories of another age, their reminders of the power
and pomp of people who had long been ghosts.

He was tall (with that insatiable curiosity of hers, she was of course
continuously studying him), tall and broad-shouldered, but not a bit
rigid or inflexible--of a figure indeed conspicuously supple, suave in
its quick movements, soft in its energetic lines, a figure that could
with equal thoroughness be lazy in repose and vehement in action. His
yellow hair was thick and fine, and if it hadn't been cropped so close
would have curled a little. His beard, in small crinkly spirals, did
actually curl, and toward the edge its yellow burned to red. And his
blue eyes were so very very blue, and so very keen, and so very frank
and pleasant--"They are like sailors' eyes," thought Lady Blanchemain,
who had a sentiment for sailors. He carried his head well thrown back,
as a man who was perfectly sure of himself and perfectly
unselfconscious; and thus unconsciously he drew attention to the
vigorous sweep of his profile, the decisive angles of his brow and nose.
His voice was brisk and cheerful and masculine; and that abruptness with
which he spoke--which seemed, as it were, to imply a previous
acquaintance--was so tempered by manifest good breeding and so coloured
by manifest good will, that it became a positive part and parcel of what
one liked in him. It was the abruptness of a man very much at his ease,
very much a man of the world, yet it was somehow, in its essence,
boyish. It expressed freshness, sincerity, conviction, a boyish
wholesale surrender of himself to the business of the moment; it
expressed, perhaps above all, a boyish thorough good understanding with
his interlocutor. "It amounts," thought his present interlocutrice, "to
a kind of infinitely sublimated bluffness."

And then she fell to examining his clothes: his loose, soft, very blue
blue flannels, with vague stripes of darker blue; his soft shirt, with
its rolling collar; his red tie, knitted of soft silk, a