house in the village a few miles from the ranch I was staying at. His
name was Cyril; the elder was Ambrose. He was certainly a very fine
fellow in appearance, tall and strongly built, with a high colour on
his open genial countenance and a smile always playing about the
corners of his rather large sensual mouth and in his greenish-hazel
eyes; but of the noble ancestry there was no faintest trace. His
features were those of the unameliorated peasant, as he may be seen in
any European country, and in this country, in Ireland particularly, but
with us he is not so common. It would seem that in England there is a
larger mixture of better blood, or that the improvements in features
due to improved conditions, physical and moral, have gone further. At
all events, one may look at a crowd anywhere in England and see only a
face here and there of the unmodified plebeian type. In a very large
majority the forehead will be less low and narrow, the nose less coarse
with less wide-spreading alae, the depression in the bridge not so
deep, the mouth not so large nor the jowl so heavy. These marks of the
unimproved adult are present in all infants at birth. Lady Clara Vere
de Vere's little bantling is in a sense not hers at all but the child
of some ugly antique race; of a Palaeolithic mother, let us say, who
lived before the last Glacial epoch and was not very much better-
looking herself than an orang-utan. It is only when the bony and
cartilaginous framework, with the muscular covering of the face,
becomes modified, and the wrinkled brown visage of the ancient pigmy
grows white and smooth, that it can be recognised as Lady Clara's own
offspring. The infant is ugly, and where the infantile features survive
in the adult the man is and must be ugly too, _unless the expression
is good_. Thus, we may know numbers of persons who would certainly
be ugly but for the redeeming expression; and this good expression,
which is "feature in the making," is, like good features, an "outward
sign of inward perfections."