He got up abruptly and tried to see himself in the dirty looking-glass over the wash-stand.  He passed a towel over it and looked again, long and carefully.  It was the first time he had ever really seen himself.  His eyes were made for seeing, but up to that moment they had been filled with the ever changing panorama of the world, at which he had been too busy gazing, ever to gaze at himself.  He saw the head and face of a young fellow of twenty, but, being unused to such appraisement, he did not know how to value it.  Above a square-domed forehead he saw a mop of brown hair, nut-brown, with a wave to it and hints of curls that were a delight to any woman, making hands tingle to stroke it and fingers tingle to pass caresses through it.  But he passed it by as without merit, in Her eyes, and dwelt long and thoughtfully on the high, square forehead,—­striving to penetrate it and learn the quality of its content.  What kind of a brain lay behind there? was his insistent interrogation.  What was it capable of?  How far would it take him?  Would it take him to her?

He wondered if there was soul in those steel-gray eyes that were often quite blue of color and that were strong with the briny airs of the sun-washed deep.  He wondered, also, how his eyes looked to her.  He tried to imagine himself she, gazing into those eyes of his, but failed in the jugglery.  He could successfully put himself inside other men’s minds, but they had to be men whose ways of life he knew.  He did not know her way of life.  She was wonder and mystery, and how could he guess one thought of hers?  Well, they were honest eyes, he concluded, and in them was neither smallness nor meanness.  The brown sunburn of his face surprised him.  He had not dreamed he was so black.  He rolled up his shirt-sleeve and compared the white underside if the arm with his face.  Yes, he was a white man, after all.  But the arms were sunburned, too.  He twisted his arm, rolled the biceps over with his other hand, and gazed underneath where he was least touched by the sun.  It was very white.  He laughed at his bronzed face in the glass at the thought that it was once as white as the underside of his arm; nor did he dream that in the world there were few pale spirits of women who could boast fairer or smoother skins than he—­fairer than where he had escaped the ravages of the sun.

His might have been a cherub’s mouth, had not the full, sensuous lips a trick, under stress, of drawing firmly across the teeth.  At times, so tightly did they draw, the mouth became stern and harsh, even ascetic.  They were the lips of a fighter and of a lover.  They could taste the sweetness of life with relish, and they could put the sweetness aside and command life.  The chin and jaw, strong and just hinting of square aggressiveness, helped the lips to command life.  Strength balanced sensuousness and had upon it a tonic effect, compelling him to love beauty that was healthy and making him