"Do you consider the face pretty?" I asked.
"Pretty! no--how can it be pretty, with sunk eyes and hollow cheeks?
but it is peculiar; it seems to think. You could have a talk with that woman, if she were alive, on other subjects than dress, visiting, and compliments."
I agreed with him, but did not say so. He went on.
"Not that I admire a head of that sort; it wants character and force; there's too much of the sen-si-tive (so he articulated it, curling his lip at the same time) in that mouth; besides, there is Aristocrat written on the brow and defined in the figure; I hate your aristocrats."
"You think, then, Mr. Hunsden, that patrician descent may be read in a distinctive cast of form and features?"
"Patrician descent be hanged! Who doubts that your lordlings may have their 'distinctive cast of form and features' as much as we----shire tradesmen have ours? But which is the best? Not theirs assuredly. As to their women, it is a little different: they cultivate beauty from childhood upwards, and may by care and training attain to a certain degree of excellence in that point, just like the oriental odalisques.
Yet even this superiority is doubtful. Compare the figure in that frame with Mrs. Edward Crimsworth--which is the finer animal?"
I replied quietly: "Compare yourself and Mr. Edward Crimsworth, Mr Hunsden."
"Oh, Crimsworth is better filled up than I am, I know besides he has a straight nose, arched eyebrows, and all that; but these advantages--if they are advantages--he did not inherit from his mother, the patrician, but from his father, old Crimsworth, who, MY father says, was as veritable a ----shire blue-dyer as ever put indigo in a vat yet withal the handsomest man in the three Ridings. It is you, William, who are the aristocrat of your family, and you are not as fine a fellow as your plebeian brother by long chalk."
There was something in Mr. Hunsden's point-blank mode of speech which rather pleased me than otherwise because it set me at my ease. I continued the conversation with a degree of interest.
"How do you happen to know that I am Mr. Crimsworth's brother? I thought you and everybody else looked upon me only in the light of a poor clerk."
"Well, and so we do; and what are you but a poor clerk? You do Crimsworth's work, and he gives you wages--shabby wages they are, too."
I was silent. Hunsden's language now bordered on the impertinent, still his manner did not offend me in the least--it only piqued my curiosity; I wanted him to go on, which he did in a little while.