Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: n. Nor did Eninger by any means rid himself of that sensation when he paid, with Fabian, a visit to the Delameres on the following day. The small house in Lincoln's Inn Square was no less shabby within than grimy without, but Alicia Delamere lighted its dinginess as a buttercup lights a dingle. She had hair almost as golden as that flower, and so white a throat that it made the ardent yet velvety blue of her eyes burn all the more deliciously keen. Her figure, however, as Eninger soon told himself, was by no means a perfection of moulding, although lissome and graceful, while her deportment betokened neither the air de race nor the simple equipments of ordinary tact and finish. Watching her with the cold eye of criticism, he pronounced her manners almost piteously deficient. She had pretty hands, but was forever moving them about, like an embarrassed child; she would smile naturally one minute and artificially the next; her postures, whether she sat or stood, were one perpetual bashful unrest. And yet it soon began to dawn upon Eninger that she was irresistibly charming. It was not that he grew to approve her, but rather that he took a secret pleasure in watching her defects. She was not at all like an English girl, nor yet like an American : she had far too little gravity for the first and far too much reserve for the last. Eninger got rapidly to be fond of watching her; she made him think of a briar-rose in a breeze, of a little ruffled brook between fringes of cresses. Her wilding sort of demureness refreshed him after the correct repose of Lady Beatrice. Then, too, there was a pathos in her shyness. For had not Fabian told him that her mother had died when the dug was at her baby lip, and did not this gaunt, sour old spectre of a father look as though he could no more rear ... --This text refers to the Paperback edition.