nder, inert and frail. He admired these
things so much that he failed to see that they expressed not only
beauty but a certain delicacy of physique, and that her languor which
appealed to him was the languor of fatigue.

"You might play to me, now," he said.

She looked at him again, a lingering, meditative look, a look in
which, if adoration was quiescent, there was no criticism and no
reproach, only a melancholy wonder. And he, too, wondered; wondered
what she was thinking of.

She was thinking a dreadful thought. "Is Horace selfish? Is Horace
selfish?" a little voice kept calling at the back of her brain and
would not be quiet. At last she answered it to her own satisfaction.
"No, he is not selfish, he is only ill."

And presently, as if on mature consideration, she rose and went into
the house.

His eyes followed, well pleased, the delicate undulations of her
figure.

Horace Jewdwine was the most exacting, the most fastidious of men. His
entire nature was dominated by the critical faculty in him; and Lucia
satisfied its most difficult demands. Try as he would, there was
really nothing in her which he could take exception to, barring her
absurd adoration of his uncle Frederick; and even that, when you came
to think of it, flowed from the innocence which was more than half her
charm. He could not say positively wherein her beauty consisted,
therefore he was always tempted to look at her in the hope of finding
out. There was nothing insistent and nothing obvious about it. Some
women, for instance, irritated your admiration by the capricious
prettiness of one or two features, or fatigued it by the monotonous
regularity of all. The beauty of others was vulgarized by the
flamboyance of some irrelevant detail, such as hair. Lucia's hair was
merely dark; and it made, as hair should make, the simplest adornment
for her head, the most perfect setting for her face. As for her
features, (though it was impossible to think of them, or anything
about her as incorrect) they eluded while they fascinated him by their
subtlety. Lucia's beauty, in short, appealed to him, because it did
not commit him to any irretrievable opinion.

But nothing, not even her beauty, pleased him better than the way in
which she managed her intellect, divining by some infallible instinct
how much of it was wanted by any given listener at a given time. She
had none of the nasty tricks that clever women have, always on the
look out to go one better