Page 476 - the-portrait-of-a-lady

ity of his person. Blighted and battered, but still responsive
and still ironic, his face was like a lighted lantern patched
with paper and unsteadily held; his thin whisker languished
upon a lean cheek; the exorbitant curve of his nose defined
itself more sharply. Lean he was altogether, lean and long
and loose-jointed; an accidental cohesion of relaxed angles.
His brown velvet jacket had become perennial; his hands
had fixed themselves in his pockets; he shambled and stum-
bled and shuffled in a manner that denoted great physical
helplessness. It was perhaps this whimsical gait that helped
to mark his character more than ever as that of the humor-
ous invalid-the invalid for whom even his own disabilities
are part of the general joke. They might well indeed with
Ralph have been the chief cause of the want of seriousness
marking his view of a world in which the reason for his own
continued presence was past finding out. Isabel had grown
fond of his ugliness; his awkwardness had become dear to
her. They had been sweetened by association; they struck
her as the very terms on which it had been given him to be
charming. He was so charming that her sense of his being
ill had hitherto had a sort of comfort in it; the state of his
health had seemed not a limitation, but a kind of intellectual
advantage; it absolved him from all professional and official
emotions and left him the luxury of being exclusively per-
sonal. The personality so resulting was delightful; he had
remained proof against the staleness of disease; he had had
to consent to be deplorably ill, yet had somehow escaped
being formally sick. Such had been the girl’s impression of
her cousin; and when she had pitied him it was only on re-

476 The Portrait of a Lady