The corner was rather small, but out of it loomed instantly the tall, supple figure of Professor Lennart with his thousand-year-old brown eyes and his young gray hair. We were all big fellows, but Lennart towered easily three inches over anybody else's head. Professionally, too, he had outstripped the rest of us. People came gadding from all over the country to consult his historical criticisms and interpretations. And I hardly know how to express the man's vivid, luminous, incandescent personality. Surely no mother in a thousand would have chosen to have her son look like me, and I hope that no mother in a million would really have yearned to have a boy look like Sagner, but any mother, I think, would gladly have compromised on Lennart. I suppose he was handsome. Rising now, as he did, from the murkiest sort of a shadow, the mental and physical radiance of him made me want to laugh right out loud just for sheer pleasure. Following closely behind his towering bulk, the girl with the contralto voice stepped out into the lamplight, and I made my most solemn and profound German bow over her proffered hand before the flaming mischief in her finger tips sent my eyes staring up into her astonishing face. I have never thought that American women are extraordinarily beautiful, but rather that they wear their beauty like a thinnish sort of veil across the adorable, insistent expressiveness of their features. But this girl's face was so thick with beauty that you could not tell in one glance, or even two glances, or perhaps three, whether she had any expression at all. Kindness or meanness, brightness or dullness, pluck or timidity, were absolutely undecipherable in that physically perfect countenance. She was very small, and very dark, and very active, with hair like the color of eight o'clock--daylight and darkness and lamplight all snarled up together--and lips all crude scarlet, and eyes as absurdly big and round as a child's good-by kiss. Yet never for one instant could you have called her anything so impassive as "attractive." "Attracting" is the only hasty, ready-made word that could possibly fit her. Personally I do not like the type. The prettiest picture postal that ever was printed could not lure me across the borders of any unknown country. When I travel even into Friendship Land I want a good, clear face-map to guide my explorations. There was a boy, too, in the room--the Lennarts' son--a brown-faced lad of thirteen whose algebraic séance with his beloved mother we had most brutally interrupted.