e could therefore but reinforce it by an intenser
note. "To tell me you _will_ treat?"

Mr. Bender had six feet of stature and an air as of having received
benefits at the hands of fortune. Substantial, powerful, easy, he shone
as with a glorious cleanness, a supplied and equipped and appointed
sanity and security; aids to action that might have figured a pair of
very ample wings--wide pinions for the present conveniently folded, but
that he would certainly on occasion agitate for great efforts and spread
for great flights. These things would have made him quite an admirable,
even a worshipful, image of full-blown life and character, had not
the affirmation and the emphasis halted in one important particular.
Fortune, felicity, nature, the perverse or interfering old fairy at his
cradle-side--whatever the ministering power might have been--had simply
overlooked and neglected his vast wholly-shaven face, which thus showed
not so much for perfunctorily scamped as for not treated, as for neither
formed nor fondled nor finished, at all. Nothing seemed to have been
done for it but what the razor and the sponge, the tooth-brush and
the looking-glass could officiously do; it had in short resisted
any possibly finer attrition at the hands of fifty years of offered
experience. It had developed on the lines, if lines they could be
called, of the mere scoured and polished and initialled "mug" rather
than to any effect of a composed physiognomy; though we must at the
same time add that its wearer carried this featureless disk as with the
warranted confidence that might have attended a warning headlight or
a glaring motor-lamp. The object, however one named it, showed you at
least where he was, and most often that he was straight upon you. It
was fearlessly and resistingly across the path of his advance that Lady
Sandgate had thrown herself, and indeed with such success that he
soon connected her demonstration with a particular motive. "For your
grandmother, Lady Sandgate?" he then returned.

"For my grandmother's _mother_, Mr. Bender--the most beautiful woman
of her time and the greatest of all Lawrences, no matter whose; as you
quite acknowledged, you know, in our talk in Bruton Street."

Mr. Bender bethought himself further--yet drawing it out; as if the
familiar fact of his being "made up to" had never had such special
softness and warmth of pressure. "Do you want very, _very_ much----?"

She had already caught him up. "'Very