Hermione was already there, sitting at a small table in a corner with her
back to him, opposite to one of the handsomest men he had ever seen. As
Artois came in, he fixed his eyes on this man with a scrutiny that was
passionate, trying to determine at a glance whether he had any right to
the success he had achieved, any fitness for the companionship that was
to be his, companionship of an unusual intellect and a still more unusual
spirit.
He saw a man obviously much younger than Hermione, not tall, athletic in
build but also graceful, with the grace that is shed through a frame by
perfectly developed, not over-developed muscles and accurately trained
limbs, a man of the Mercury rather than of the Hercules type, with thick,
low-growing black hair, vivid, enthusiastic black eyes, set rather wide
apart under curved brows, and very perfectly proportioned, small,
straight features, which were not undecided, yet which suggested the
features of a boy. In the complexion there was a tinge of brown that
denoted health and an out-door life--an out-door life in the south,
Artois thought.
As Artois, standing quite still, unconsciously, in the doorway of the
restaurant, looked at this man, he felt for a moment as if he himself
were a splendid specimen of a cart-horse faced by a splendid specimen of
a race-horse. The comparison he was making was only one of physical
endowments, but it pained him. Thinking with an extraordinary rapidity,
he asked himself why it was that this man struck him at once as very much
handsomer than other men with equally good features and figures whom he
had seen, and he found at once the answer to his question. It was the
look of Mercury in him that made him beautiful, a look of radiant
readiness for swift movement that suggested the happy messenger poised
for flight to the gods, his mission accomplished, the expression of an
intensely vivid activity that could be exquisitely obedient. There was an
extraordinary fascination in it. Artois realized that, for he was
fascinated even in this bitter moment that he told himself ought not to
be bitter. While he gazed at Delarey he was conscious of a feeling that
had sometimes come upon him when he had watched Sicilian peasant boys
dancing the tarantella under the stars by the Ionian sea, a feeling that
one thing in creation ought to be immortal on earth, the passionate,
leaping flame of joyous youth, physically careless, physically rapturous,
unconscious of death and of decay. Delarey seemed to him like a
tarantella in repose, if such a thing could be.