The young man was introduced, and they sat down at the table. In most respects Fanny was curiously different from Elizabeth; each was not so much the antithesis as the complement to the other. Fanny was just a little taller than Elizabeth (George disliked short women), and where Elizabeth was dark and Egyptian-looking and pale, Fanny was golden and English (not chocolate-box English) and most delicate white and red. She was a bit like Priscilla, George thought, but with the soft gold of Priscilla made hard and glittering like an exquisite metallic flower. There was something both gem-like and flower-like in Fanny. Perhaps that was due to her eyes. With other women you are conscious almost immediately of all sorts of beauties and defects, but with Fanny you were instantaneously absorbed by the eyes. When you thought about her afterwards, you just saw a mental image of those extraordinary blue eyes, disassociated from the rest of her, like an Edgar Poe vision. But unlike so many vivid blue eyes, they were gem-like rather than flower-like; they were not soft nor stupid nor sentimental nor languid, but clear, alert and rather hard. You may see exactly their shade of colour in the deeper parts of Lake Garda on a sunny day. Yet the quality was not aqueous, but vitreous. Venetian glass, perhaps? No, that is too opaque. It is very hard to say what was the quality which made them so remarkable. Men looked at them once and fell helplessly in love, one might say almost noisily in love—Fanny didn’t mind, it was obviously her _métier_ to have men fall in love with her. Perhaps Fanny’s eyes were simply made a symbol in the imagination of that mysterious sexual attraction which radiated from her, or perhaps they conformed to some unwritten but instinctively recognized canon of the perfect eye, the Platonic “idea” of eyes.... With Elizabeth you saw not the eyes alone, but the whole head. You would have liked to keep Fanny’s eyes, magnificently set in gold, in an open jewel-casket, to look at when you doubted whether any beauty remained in the dull world. But with Elizabeth you wanted the whole head, it was so much like one of those small stone heads of Egyptian princesses in the Louvre. So very Egyptian. The full delicately-moulded lips, the high cheek-bones, the slightly oblique eye-sockets, the magnificent line from ear to chin, the upward sweep of the wide brow, the straight black hair. Oddly enough, on analysis Elizabeth’s eyes proved to be quite as beautiful as Fanny’s, but somehow less ostentatiously lovely. They were deeper and softer, and which is rare in dark eyes, intelligent. Fanny’s blue eyes were intelligent enough, but they hadn’t quite the subtle depths of Elizabeth’s, they hadn’t the same reserve.