A large window was open over the archway, and at this window a fellow was staring down at her. He stood in his shirt-sleeves with a billiard-cue in his hand waiting his turn to play. It was the same young fellow, gentleman if you like, whose pale face had so displeased her that morning as he rode under when she watched the folk go by to fair. He was certainly the most advanced in civilization of all who had passed Plum Corner, and yet there was something in that pale and rather delicate face which was not in the coarse lineaments of the "varmers" and "drauvers" and "pig-dealers" who had gone by under the wall. Something that insulted her. The face at the window was appraising her. It was reckoning her up--so much for eyes, so much for hair, so much for figure, and as this went on the fingers were filling a pipe from an elastic tobacco-pouch. There was no romance, no poetry in that calculation--no rapture or pure admiration of beauty; there was a billiard-cue and a tobacco-pouch, and a glass of spirits and water, and an atmosphere of smoke, and a sound of clicking ivory balls at the back of the thought. His thumb was white where he had chalked it to make a better bridge for the cue. His face was white; for he had chalked it with dissipation. His physical body was whitened--chalked--a whited sepulchre; his moral nature likewise chalked. At the back of his thought lay not the high esteem of the poet-thinker for beauty, but the cynical blackguardism of the XIXth century. The cynicism that deliberately reckons up things a Shakespeare would admire at their lowest possible sale value. A slow whiff of smoke from a corner of the sneering mouth, an air of intense knowingness, as much as to say, "You may depend upon me--I've been behind the scenes. All this is got up, you know; stage effect in front, pasteboard at the rear; nothing in it." In the sensuality of Nero there may still be found some trace of a higher nature; "What an artist the world has lost!" he exclaimed, dying. The empress Theodora craved for the applause of the theatre to which she exposed her beauty. This low, cynical nineteenth century blackguardism thinks of nothing but lowness, and has no ideal. The milliner even has an ideal, she looks to colour, shape, effect; though but in dress, yet it is an ideal. There was no ideal in Ned Marks. They called him from within to take his turn with the cue; he did not answer, he was so absorbed in his calculations. He was clever--in a way; he had quite sufficient penetration to see that this was no common girl. She was not beautiful--yet, she was not even pretty, and so plainly dressed; still there was something marked in her features. And she was with old Iden. Amaryllis did not understand the meaning of his glance, but she felt that it was an insult. She looked down quickly, seized her grandfather's arm, and drew him out from the pavement into the street, yielding a little to the current and so hoping to presently pass it.