That in turn raised a blindly selfish desire to make her feel and acknowledge his mastery.  He did not define the emotion exactly, nor see clearly what he wished to do, but in a general way he wanted to be necessary to her, and to let her know at the same time that she was nothing to him.  He was quite sure that the opposite was the truth just now.

At this point he shrugged his shoulders, angry that he should have slipped so easily into the character of a sullen boy, hating a benefactor for no reason other than his benefactions; but the same vicious impulse made him study the face of Sally Fortune with an impersonal, coldly critical eye.  It was not easy to do, for she sat with her head tilted back a little, as though to take the warmth of the fire more fully.  The faint smile on her lips showed her comfort, mingled with retrospection.

Here he lost the trend of his thoughts by beginning to wonder of what she could be thinking, but he called himself back sharply to the analysis of her features.  It was a game with which he had often amused himself among the girls of his eastern acquaintance.  Their beauty, after all, was their only weapon, and when he discovered that that weapon was not of pure steel, they became nothing; it was like pushing them away with an arm of infinite length.

There was food for criticism in Sally’s features.  The nose, of course, was tipped up a bit, and the mouth too large, but Anthony discovered that it was almost impossible to centre his criticism on either feature.  The tip-tilt of the nose suggested a quaint and infinitely buoyant spirit; the mouth, if generously wide, was exquisitely made.  She was certainly not pretty, but he began to feel with equal certainty that she was beautiful.

A waiting mood came on him while he watched, as one waits through a great symphony and endures the monotonous passages for the sake of the singing bursts of harmony to which the commoner parts are a necessary background.  He began to wish that she would turn her head so that he could see her eyes.  They were like the inspired part of that same symphony, a beauty which could not be remembered and was always new, satisfying.  He could make her turn by speaking, and knowing that this was so, he postponed the pleasure like a miser who will only count his gold once a day.

From the side view he dwelt on the short, delicately carved upper lip and the astonishingly pleasant curve of the cheek.

“Look at me,” he said abruptly.

She turned, observed him calmly, and then glanced back to the fire.  She asked no question.

Her chin rested on her hands, now, so that when she spoke her head nodded a little and gave a significance to what she said.

“The grey doesn’t belong to you?”

So she was thinking of horses!

“Well,” she repeated.

“No.”

“Hoss-lifting,” she mused.

“Why shouldn’t I take a horse when they had shot down mine?”