She was disappointed. She had expected to see a striking and powerful, if not pleasant face; but the most salient points of his appearance were a tendency to foppishness in dress and rather more than a tendency to a certain veiled insolence of expression and manner. For the rest, he was as swarthy as a mulatto, and, notwithstanding his lameness, as agile as a cat. His whole personality was oddly suggestive of a black jaguar. The forehead and left cheek were terribly disfigured by the long crooked scar of the old sabre-cut; and she had already noticed that, when he began to stammer in speaking, that side of his face was affected with a nervous twitch. But for these defects he would have been, in a certain restless and uncomfortable way, rather handsome; but it was not an attractive face. Presently he began again in his soft, murmuring purr (“Just the voice a jaguar would talk in, if it could speak and were in a good humour,” Gemma said to herself with rising irritation). “I hear,” he said, “that you are interested in the radical press, and write for the papers.” “I write a little; I have not time to do much.” “Ah, of course! I understood from Signora Grassini that you undertake other important work as well.” Gemma raised her eyebrows slightly. Signora Grassini, like the silly little woman she was, had evidently been chattering imprudently to this slippery creature, whom Gemma, for her part, was beginning actually to dislike. “My time is a good deal taken up,” she said rather stiffly; “but Signora Grassini overrates the importance of my occupations. They are mostly of a very trivial character.” “Well, the world would be in a bad way if we ALL of us spent our time in chanting dirges for Italy. I should think the neighbourhood of our host of this evening and his wife would make anybody frivolous, in self-defence. Oh, yes, I know what you're going to say; you are perfectly right, but they are both so deliciously funny with their patriotism.--Are you going in already? It is so nice out here!” “I think I will go in now. Is that my scarf? Thank you.” He had picked it up, and now stood looking at her with wide eyes as blue and innocent as forget-me-nots in a brook. “I know you are offended with me,” he said penitently, “for fooling that painted-up wax doll; but what can a fellow do?” “Since you ask me, I do think it an ungenerous and--well--cowardly thing to hold one's intellectual inferiors up to ridicule in that way; it is like laughing at a cripple, or------” He caught his breath suddenly, painfully; and shrank back, glancing at his lame foot and mutilated hand. In another instant he recovered his self-possession and burst out laughing. “That's hardly a fair comparison, signora; we cripples don't flaunt our deformities in people's faces as she does her stupidity. At least give us credit for recognizing that crooked backs are no pleasanter than crooked ways. There is a step here; will you take my arm?”