She had already formed a sort of estimate of his character, as an indifferent observer may do, and any woman previous to the inflaming of her imagination, if that is in store for her; and she now fell to work resetting the puzzle it became as soon her positive conclusions had to be shaped again.  ‘But women never can know young men,’ she wrote to Emma, after praising his good repute as one of the brotherhood.  ’He drops pretty sentences now and then:  no compliments; milky nuts.  Of course he has a head, or he would not be where he is—­and that seems always to me the most enviable place a young man can occupy.’  She observed in him a singular conflicting of a buoyant animal nature with a curb of studiousness, as if the fardels of age were piling on his shoulders before youth had quitted its pastures.

His build of limbs and his features were those of the finely-bred English; he had the English taste for sports, games, manly diversions; and in the bloom of life, under thirty, his head was given to bend.  The head bending on a tall upright figure, where there was breadth of chest, told of weights working.  She recollected his open look, larger than inquiring, at the introduction to her; and it recurred when she uttered anything specially taking.  What it meant was past a guess, though comparing it with the frank directness of Redworth’s eyes, she saw the difference between a look that accepted her and one that dilated on two opinions.

Her thought of the gentleman was of a brilliant young charioteer in the ruck of the race, watchful for his chance to push to the front; and she could have said that a dubious consort might spoil a promising career.  It flattered her to think that she sometimes prompted him, sometimes illumined.  He repeated sentences she had spoken.  ’I shall be better able to describe Mr. Dacier when you and I sit together, my Emmy, and a stroke here and there completes the painting.  Set descriptions are good for puppets.  Living men and women are too various in the mixture fashioning them—­even the “external presentment”—­to be livingly rendered in a formal sketch.  I may tell you his eyes are pale blue, his features regular, his hair silky, brownish, his legs long, his head rather stooping (only the head), his mouth commonly closed; these are the facts, and you have seen much the same in a nursery doll.  Such literary craft is of the nursery.  So with landscapes.  The art of the pen (we write on darkness) is to rouse the inward vision, instead of labouring with a Drop-scene brush, as if it were to the eye; because our flying minds cannot contain a protracted description.  That is why the poets, who spring imagination with a word or a phrase, paint lasting pictures.  The Shakespearian, the Dantesque, are in a line, two at most.  He lends an attentive ear when I speak, agrees or has a quaint pucker of the eyebrows dissenting inwardly.  He lacks mental liveliness—­cheerfulness, I should say, and is thankful to have it imparted.  One suspects