e-eyed
indifference. And every time that he shrugged his shoulders or crossed
his knees he jingled and jangled incongruously among his coil-boxes
and insulators, like some splendid young Viking of old, half blacked
up for a modern minstrel show.
More than being absurdly blond and absurdly messy, the Young
Electrician had one of those extraordinarily sweet, extraordinarily
vital, strangely mysterious, utterly unexplainable masculine faces
that fill your senses with an odd, impersonal disquietude, an itching
unrest, like the hazy, teasing reminder of some previous existence in
a prehistoric cave, or, more tormenting still, with the tingling,
psychic prophecy of some amazing emotional experience yet to come. The
sort of face, in fact, that almost inevitably flares up into a woman's
startled vision at the one crucial moment in her life when she is not
supposed to be considering alien features.
Out from the servient sho-
ulders of some smooth-tongued Waiter it
stares, into the scared dilating pupils of the White Satin Bride with
her pledged hand clutching her Bridegroom's sleeve. Up from the
gravelly, pick-and-shovel labor of the new-made grave it lifts its
weirdly magnetic eyes to the Widow's tears. Down from some petted
Princeling's silver-trimmed saddle horse it smiles its electrifying,
wistful smile into the Peasant's sodden weariness. Across the slender
white rail of an always _out-going_ steamer it stings back into your
gray, land-locked consciousness like the tang of a scarlet spray. And
the secret of the face, of course, is "Lure"; but to save your soul
you could not decide in any specific case whether the lure is the lure
of personality, or the lure of physiognomy--a mere accidental,
coincidental, haphazard harmony of forehead and cheek-bone and
twittering facial muscles.
Something, indeed, in the peculiar set of the Young