RODERICK HUDSON
grand air and a great many furbelows. She looked very hard at our friends as she passed, and glanced back over her shoulder as if to quicken the step of a young girl who slowly followed her. She had such an expansive majesty of mien that Rowland supposed she must have some proprietary right in the villa and was not just then in a permissive mood. Beside her walked a little elderly man, tightly buttoned in a shabby black coat, but with a flower in his lappet and a pair of soiled light gloves. He was a semi-grotesque figure, and might have passed for a gentleman of the old school reduced by adversity to playing cicerone to foreigners of distinction. He had little black eyes that glittered like diamonds and rolled about like balls of quick silver, and a white moustache, cut short and as stiff as a worn-out brush. He was smiling with extreme urbanity and talking in a low mellifluous voice to the lady, who evidently was not attentive. At a considerable distance behind this couple strolled a young girl, apparently of about twenty. She was tall and slender and dressed with extreme elegance; she led by a cord a large poodle of the most fantastic aspect. He was combed and decked like a ram for sacrifice; his trunk and haunches were of the most transparent pink, his fleecy head and shoulders as white as jeweller's cotton, his tail and ears ornamented with long blue ribbons. He stepped along stiffly and solemnly beside his mistress, with an air of conscious elegance. There was something at first slightly absurd in the sight of a young lady gravely appended to an animal of these incongru-
94
