and his--still sentimental--experiences as a county magistrate; and
with his intense, optimistic belief that the woman he was making
love to at the moment was the one he was destined, at last, to be
eternally constant to. . . . Well, I fancy he could put up a pretty
good deal of talk when there was no man around to make him feel
shy. And I was quite astonished, during his final burst out to
me--at the very end of things, when the poor girl was on her way
to that fatal Brindisi and he was trying to persuade himself and me
that he had never really cared for her--I was quite astonished to
observe how literary and how just his expressions were. He talked
like quite a good book--a book not in the least cheaply
sentimental. You see, I suppose he regarded me not so much as a
man. I had to be regarded as a woman or a solicitor. Anyhow, it
burst out of him on that horrible night. And then, next morning, he
took me over to the Assizes and I saw how, in a perfectly calm
and business-like way, he set to work to secure a verdict of not
guilty for a poor girl, the daughter of one of his tenants, who had
been accused of murdering her baby. He spent two hundred
pounds on her defence . . . Well, that was Edward Ashburnham.

I had forgotten about his eyes. They were as blue as the sides of a
certain type of box of matches. When you looked at them
carefully you saw that they were perfectly honest, perfectly
straightforward, perfectly, perfectly stupid. But the brick pink of
his complexion, running perfectly level to the brick pink of his
inner eyelids, gave them a curious, sinister expression--like a
mosaic of blue porcelain set in pink china. And that chap, coming
into a room, snapped up the gaze of every woman in it, as
dexterously as a conjurer pockets billiard balls. It was most
amazing. You know the man on the stage who throws up sixteen