lways ended by drifting to the platform, to his
table. They sat on it in friendly attitudes and talked to him.

He was so glad to be talked to, so frankly, engagingly, beautifully
glad, that the pathos of it would have been too poignant, the
obligation it almost forced on you too unbearable, but for his power,
his monstrous, mysterious, personal glamour.

It lay partly, no doubt, in his appearance; not, no, not at all, in
his make-up. He wore, like a thousand city clerks, a high collar, a
speckled tie, a straight, dark blue serge suit. But in spite of the
stiffness thus imposed on him, he had, unaccountably, the shy, savage
beauty of an animal untamed, uncaught. He belonged to the slender,
nervous, fair type; but the colour proper to it had been taken out of
him by the shop. His head presented the utmost clearness of line
compatible with irregularity of outline; and his face (from its heavy
square forehead to its light square jaw) was full of strange
harmonies, adjustments, compensations. His chin, rather long in a
front view, rather prominent in profile, balanced the powerful
proportions of his forehead. His upper lip, in spite of its slender
arch, betrayed a youthful eagerness of the senses; but this effect was
subtilized by the fineness of his lower lip, and, when they closed, it
disappeared in the sudden, serious straightening of the lines. Even
his nose (otherwise a firm feature, straight in the bridge and rather
broad at the end) became grave or eager as the pose of the head hid or
revealed the nostrils. He had queer eyes, of a thick dark blue, large,
though deep set, showing a great deal of iris and very little white.
Without being good-looking he was good to look at, when you could look
long enough to find all these things out. He did not like being looked
at. If you tried to hold him that way, his eyes were all over the
place, seeking an escape; but they held _you_, whether you liked it or
not.

It was uncanny, that fascination. If he had chosen to exert it in the
interests of his shop he could presumably have cleaned those friendly
young men out any day. But he never did exert it. Surrounded by wares
whose very appearance was a venal solicitation, he never hinted by so
much as the turn of a phrase that there was anything about him to be
bought. And after what had passed between them, they felt that to hint
it themselves--to him--would have been the last indelicacy. If they
ever asked the price of a book it