legible door-plate of his identity, burnished with punctual washing and shavingthe least thing that was decent that you would know him by?
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This face arrested Oliver Lyon: it struck him at first as very handsome. The gentleman might still be called young, and his features were regular: he had a plentiful, fair moustache that curled up at the ends, a brilliant, gallant, almost adventurous air, and a big shining breastpin in the middle of his shirt. He appeared a fine satisfied soul, and Lyon perceived that wherever he rested his friendly eye there fell an influence as pleasant as the September sunas if he could make grapes and pears or even human affection ripen by looking at them. What was odd in him was a certain mixture of the correct and the extravagant: as if he were an adventurer imitating a gentleman with rare perfection or a gentleman who had taken a fancy to go about with hidden arms. He might have been a dethroned prince or the war-correspondent of a newspaper: he represented both enterprise and tradition, good manners and bad taste. Lyon at length fell into conversation with the lady beside himthey dispensed, as he had had to dispense at dinner-parties before, with an introductionby asking who this personage might be.
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Oh, he's Colonel Capadose, don't you know? Lyon didn't know and he asked for further information. His neighbour had a sociable manner and evidently was accustomed to quick transitions; she turned from her other interlocutor with a methodical air, as a good cook lifts the cover of the next saucepan. He has been a great deal in Indiaisn't he rather celebrated? she inquired. Lyon confessed he had never heard of him, and she went on, Well, perhaps he isn't; but he says he is, and if you think it, that's just the same, isn't it?
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I mean if he thinks itthat's just as good, I suppose.
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Do you mean that he says that which is not?
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Oh dear, nobecause I never know. He is exceedingly clever and amusingquite the cleverest person in the house, unless indeed you are more so. But that I can't tell yet, can I? I only know about the people I know; I think that's celebrity enough!
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