The words, just a little
satirically spoken: "What is, my dear young man?" stopped him at once.
Looking for the complement and counterpart of Lady Casterley, one
would perhaps have singled out her brother. All her abrupt decision
was negated in his profound, ironical urbanity. His voice and look and
manner were like his velvet coat, which had here and there a whitish
sheen, as if it had been touched by moonlight. His hair too had that
sheen. His very delicate features were framed in a white beard and
moustache of Elizabethan shape. His eyes, hazel and still clear, looked
out very straight, with a certain dry kindliness. His face, though
unweathered and unseamed, and much too fine and thin in texture, had a
curious affinity to the faces of old sailors or fishermen who have lived
a simple, practical life in the light of an overmastering tradition. It
was the face of a man with a very set creed, and inclined to be satiric
towards innovations, examined by him and rejected full fifty years ago.
One felt that a brain not devoid either of subtlety or aesthetic quality
had long given up all attempts to interfere with conduct; that all
shrewdness of speculation had given place to shrewdness of practical
judgment based on very definite experience. Owing to lack of advertising
power, natural to one so conscious of his dignity as to have lost all
care for it, and to his devotion to a certain lady, only closed by
death, his life had been lived, as it were, in shadow.
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