"Oh, get out!" said Ralph Addington perfunctorily.
"As sure as I'm sitting here," Honey went on earnestly. "I heard a
woman's laugh. Any of you others get it?"
The sense of humor, it seemed, was not extinct. Honey's companions burst
into roars of laughter. For the rest of the morning, they joked Honey
about his hallucination. And Honey, who always responded in kind to any
badinage, received this in silence. In fact, wherever he could, a little
pointedly, he changed the subject.
Honey Smith was the type of man whom everybody jokes, partly because he
received it with such good humor, partly because he turned it back with
so ready and so charming a wit. Also it gave his fellow creatures a
gratifying sense of equality to pick humorous flaws in one so manifestly
a darling of the gods.
Honey Smith possessed not a trace of genius, not a suggestion of what is
popularly termed "temperament." He had no mind to speak of, and not more
than the usual amount of character. In fact, but for one thing, he was
an average person. That one thing was personality - and personality he
possessed to an extraordinary degree. Indeed, there seemed to be
something mysteriously compelling about this personality of Honey's. The
whole world of creatures felt its charm. Dumb beasts fawned on him.
Children clung to him. Old people lingered near as though they could
light dead fires in the blaze of his radiant youth. Men hob-nobbed with
him; his charm brushed off on to the dryest and dullest so that,
temporarily, they too bloomed with personality. As for women - His
appearance among them was the signal for a noiseless social cataclysm.
They slipped and slid in his direction as helplessly as if an inclined
plane had opened under their feet. They fluttered in circles about him
like birds around a light. If he had been allowed to follow the pull of
his inclination, they would have held a subsidiary place in his
existence. For he was practical, balanced, sane. He had, moreover, the
tendency towards temperance of the born athlete. Besides all this, his
main interests were man-interests. But women would not let him alone. He
had but to look and the thing was done. Wreaths hung on every balcony
for Honey Smith and, always at his approach, the door of the harem swung
wide. He was a little lazy, almost discourteously uninterested in his
attitude towards, the individual female; for he had never had to exert
himself.
It is likely that all this personal popularity would have been the
result of that trick of personality. But many good fairies had been
summoned to Honey's christening; he had good looks besides. He was
really tall, although his broad shoulders seemed to reduce him to medium
height. Brown-skinned, brown-eyed, brown-haired, his skin was as smooth
as satin, his eyes as clear as crystal, his hair as thick as fur. His
expression had tremendous sparkle. But his main physical charm was a
smile which crumpled his brown face into an engaging irregularity of
contour and lighted it with an expression brilliant with mirth and
friendliness.