“We tried to make her explain. It was a little of everything; just this and that; hair, lips, nails, palms, of course! And a certain indescribable smooth fullness under the skin, a rounder build of the eyeball, a more springing curve of the lashes, and so on. Janvier was even then getting together the data for that famous book of his on ‘Ethnic Details,’ and he used to encourage Anita in such observations, and check them up. One couldn’t help admiring her astonishing acuteness and probity. The three of us would often compare notes about young Richmond, but never with malicious intent, I assure you. And though Anita always treated him with the respect she knew was due him, it sometimes fell short of what he longed for.” “The Moor was haughty, then?” “Haughty enough, but by no means a Moor, any more than you are. His eyes were blue, and really lighter than yours, my boy. With a queer shine in them, sometimes! I was sorry for him, and so was Anita. But Janvier, with his obsession about equality and justice, sturdily refused to see that there was anything to be sorry about, except our nasty human point of view. He gave a lot of the care of his colored patients to Richmond, who did nobly by them, too. Only, by some mysterious instinct, they always recognized _him_ as one of _them_. And it hurt him, clean through and through. How that boy suffered! He had real genius, we knew. And I suppose this helped Janvier to put up with Richmond’s occasional frantic outbursts against his fate. We used to call them his cyclones of the soul, not dreaming that a similar expression was to be invented long afterward. These storms of passion always left him crumpled up into nothingness before Janvier, Anita, even myself! I tell you, Gerald, the man’s agonies were atrocious. He had a kind of gallant courage, too, for all his self-abasement; you would be pretty dull, if you couldn’t see the sublimity of it. After every outbreak, and the subsequent surrender, he would painfully pick up the pieces of himself, and put them together again in a dazed sort of way, and next day devote himself to his work, more single-mindedly than ever. Janvier was his chosen pattern and example, in that.” “But perhaps the poor chap worked _too_ hard,” suggested Gerald.