· PARTISAN REVIEW
Zits
spoke louder to him than words; she could never persuade him
that she hated Togliatti from the
left,
any more than she could con–
vince a guide in Paris of her indifference to Puvis de Chavannes.
Her attention he took for assent, and only the young man troubled
him, as he had troubled many guides in many palaces and museums
by lingering behind in some room he fancied; an occasional half–
smothered burst of laughter indicated to the two talkers that he was
still in the Dostoevsky attic. But the glances of tender understanding
that the young lady kept rather pointedly turning toward her friend
were an explanation in pantomime; his alarms stilled, the visitor
neatly drew up his trousers and sat down.
They judged him to be a man about forty-two years old. In
America he might have passed for younger; he had kept his hair,
light-brown and slightly oiled, with a ripple at the brow and a half–
ripple at the back; his figure, moreover, was slim-it had not taken
on that architectural form, those transepts, bows, and barrel-vaulting,
that with Americans demonstrate (how quickly often!) that the man
is no longer a boy but an Institution. Like the young lady's hairdresser,
like the gay little grocer on Third Avenue, he had retained in middle
age something for which there is no English word, something
tres
mignon,
something
gentil,
something
joli garyon.
It lay in a quickness
and lightness of movement, in slim ankles, small feet, thin, agile
wrists, in a certain demure swoop of lowering eyelids, in the play of
lashes, and the butterfly flutter of the airy white handkerchief pro–
truding from the breast pocket. It lay also in
.a
politeness so eager
as to seem freshly learned and in a childlike vanity, a covert sense of
performance, in which one could trace the swing of the censer and the
half-military, half-theatrical swish of the altar-boy's skirts.
But if this sprightliness of demeanor and of dress gave the visitor
an appearance of youthfulness, it also gave him, by its very exaggera–
tion, a morbid appearance of age. Those quick, small smiles, those
turns of the eye, and expressive raisings of the eyebrow had left a
thousand tiny wrinkles on his dust-colored face; his slimness too had
something cadaverous in it--chicken-breasted he appeared in his tan
silk gabardine suit. And, oddly enough, this look of premature senility
was not masculine but feminine. Though no more barbered and per–
fumed than the next Italian man, he evoked the black mass of the
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