of golden hair, or an abundant cluster of nut-brown?  Do you like your blonde with limpid blue eyes, or prefer an endowment of sunny hazel?  Finally, are you taken by an air of artistic innocence winding serpentine about your heart’s fibres; or is blushing simplicity sweeter to you?  Mrs. Lovell’s eyebrows were the faintly-marked trace of a perfect arch.  The other young person’s were thickish, more level; a full brown colour.  She looked as if she had not yet attained to any sense of her being a professed beauty:  but the fair widow was clearly bent upon winning you, and had a shy, playful intentness of aspect.  Her pure white skin was flat on the bone; the lips came forward in a soft curve, and, if they were not artistically stained, were triumphantly fresh.  Here, in any case, she beat her rival, whose mouth had the plebeian beauty’s fault of being too straight in a line, and was not trained, apparently, to tricks of dainty pouting.

It was morning, and the cousins having sponged in pleasant cold water, arranged themselves for exercise, and came out simultaneously into the sitting-room, slippered, and in flannels.  They nodded and went through certain curt greetings, and then Algernon stepped to a cupboard and tossed out the leather gloves.  The room was large and they had a tolerable space for the work, when the breakfast-table had been drawn a little on one side.  You saw at a glance which was the likelier man of the two, when they stood opposed.  Algernon’s rounded features, full lips and falling chin, were not a match, though he was quick on his feet, for the wary, prompt eyes, set mouth, and hardness of Edward.  Both had stout muscle, but in Edward there was vigour of brain as well, which seemed to knit and inform his shape without which, in fact, a man is as a ship under no command.  Both looked their best; as, when sparring, men always do look.

“Now, then,” said Algernon, squaring up to his cousin in good style, “now’s the time for that unwholesome old boy underneath to commence groaning.”

“Step as light as you can,” replied Edward, meeting him with the pretty motion of the gloves.

“I’ll step as light as a French dancing-master.  Let’s go to Paris and learn the savate, Ned.  It must be a new sensation to stand on one leg and knock a fellow’s hat off with the other.”

“Stick to your fists.”

“Hang it!  I wish your fists wouldn’t stick to me so.”

“You talk too much.”

“Gad, I don’t get puffy half so soon as you.”

“I want country air.”

“You said you were going out, old Ned.”

“I changed my mind.”

Saying which, Edward shut his teeth, and talked for two or three hot minutes wholly with his fists.  The room shook under Algernon’s boundings to right and left till a blow sent him back on the breakfast-table, shattered a cup on the floor, and bespattered his close flannel shirt with a funereal coffee-tinge.