“You? Oh, I don’t care a straw what you know!” she said; and he had at any rate a mind sufficiently enriched to see what she meant by that. If she meant he was so good-looking that he might pass on this score alone her judgement was conceivable, though many women would strongly have dissented from it. He was as small as he had announced from the first—he had never got his growth—and she could easily see that he was not what she at least would call strong. His bones were small, his chest was narrow, his complexion pale, his whole figure almost childishly slight; and Millicent noted afterwards that he had a very delicate hand—the hand, as she said to herself, of a gentleman. What she liked was his face and something jaunty and romantic, almost theatrical, in his whole little person. Miss Henning was not acquainted with any member of the dramatic profession, but she supposed vaguely that that was the way an actor would look in private life. Hyacinth’s features were perfect; his eyes, large and much divided, had as their usual expression a kind of witty, almost an impertinent, candour, and a small, soft, fair moustache disposed itself upon his upper lip in a way that made him appear to smile even when his heart was heavy. The waves of his dense fine hair clustered round a forehead which was high enough to suggest remarkable things, and Miss Henning had observed that when he first appeared he wore his little soft circular hat in a way that left these frontal locks very visible. He was dressed in an old brown velveteen jacket and wore exactly the bright-coloured necktie which Miss Pynsent’s quick fingers used of old to shape out of hoarded remnants of silk and muslin. He was shabby and work-stained, but an observant eye would have caught the hint of an “arrangement” in his dress (his appearance being plainly not a matter of indifference to himself), while a painter (not of the heroic) would have liked to make a sketch of him. There was something exotic in him, and yet, with his sharp young face, destitute of bloom but not of sweetness, and a certain conscious cockneyism that pervaded him, he was as strikingly as Millicent, in her own degree, a product of the London streets and the London air. He looked both ingenuous and slightly wasted, amused, amusing and indefinably sad. Women had always found him touching, but he made them—so they had repeatedly assured him—die of laughing. “I think you had better shut the door,” said Miss Pynsent, meaning that he had better shut their departing visitor out.