A pleasantly florid face, quaintly expressive of an importance about
which its owner was undecided, imposed above a fullish waistcoat a chin
which was now tending toward the slopes of middle age. The eyes were
mild and vaguely speculative, the lips full and loosely formed, and when
they smiled they began tentatively in a tremulous lift showing only the
two upper front teeth--the smile of a woman rather than of a man. This
smile--when it made, as it so often had to make, its appearance in
public--was curiously suggestive of interrogation. "Am I now meant to
smile?" it seemed to say. "Very good, then I will." This tentatively
advanced smile of a countenance so highly exalted for others to gaze on,
was peculiarly winning to those who were its recipients; it suggested a
gentle character, indicating through its shyness both the giving and the
receiving of a favor; and among those in personal attendance on him the
King was--perhaps on account of that smile--more liked than he knew.
Servants whom the vastness of his establishments did not convert into
total strangers found him a considerate master, full of a personal
interest in their snug lives, and with a carefully practised memory for
the numbers and names of their children; and the only complaint that
even his valets had against him was that he remained his own barber and
evinced a certain reluctance in casting his suits until they had begun
to show a suspicion of wear. In outward relations he was a kind, touchy,
companionable soul; inwardly he was one who suffered acutely from lack
of companionship and conversation, not because he had not plenty of
people to talk to, but because so many things came into his head that he
must not say, while the correct substitutes for them only occurred to
him later. And thus it came about that a good deal of his intercourse
with humanity was limited to a pleasant expression of face, wearing
generally, especially when it smiled, a wistful note of interrogation.