comparison he was making was only one of physical
endowments, but it pained him. Thinking with an extraordinary rapidity,
he asked himself why it was that this man struck him at once as very much
handsomer than other men with equally good features and figures whom he
had seen, and he found at once the answer to his question. It was the
look of Mercury in him that made him beautiful, a look of radiant
readiness for swift movement that suggested the happy messenger poised
for flight to the gods, his mission accomplished, the expression of an
intensely vivid activity that could be exquisitely obedient. There was an
extraordinary fascination in it. Artois realized that, for he was
fascinated even in this bitter moment that he told himself ought not to
be bitter. While he gazed at Delarey he was conscious of a feeling that
had sometimes come upon him when he had watched Sicilian peasant boys
dancing the tarantella under the stars by the Ionian sea, a feeling that
one thing in creation ought to be immortal on earth, the passionate,
leaping flame of joyous youth, physically careless, physically rapturous,
unconscious of death and of decay. Delarey seemed to him like a
tarantella in repose, if such a thing could be.

Suddenly Hermione turned round, as if conscious that he was there. When
she did so he understood in the very depths of him why such a man as
Delarey attracted, must attract, such a woman as Hermione. That which she
had in the soul Delarey seemed to express in the body--sympathy,
enthusiasm, swiftness, courage. He was like a statue of her feelings, but
a statue endowed with life. And the fact that her physique was a sort of
contradiction of her inner self must make more powerful the charm of a
Delarey for her. As Hermione looked round at him, turning her tall figure
rather slowly in the chair, Artois made up his mind that she had been
captured by the physique of this man. He could not be surprised, but he
still felt angry.

Hermione introduced Delarey to him eagerly, not attempting to hide her
anxiety for the two men to make friends at once. Her desire was so
transparent and so warm that for a moment Artois felt touched, and
inclined to trample upon his evil mood and leave no trace of it. He was
also secretly too human to remain wholly unmoved by Delarey's reception
of him. Delarey had a rare charm of manner whose source was a happy, but
not foolishly shy, modesty, which made him eager to please, and convinced
that