that spanned his knees he sorted and re-sorted with infinite
earnestness a large and varied consignment of "Ladies' Pink and Blue
Ribbed Undervests." Surely no other man in the whole southward-bound
Canadian train could have been at once so ingenuous and so nonchalant.

There was nothing dressy, however, about the Young Electrician. From
his huge cowhide boots to the lead smouch that ran from his rough,
square chin to the very edge of his astonishingly blond curls, he was
one delicious mess of toil and old clothes and smiling, blue-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 shoulders 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