Presently there entered a tall young man with a long, thin face,
curtained on either side with enormous masses of black hair, like a slip
of the young moon glimmering through a pine-wood.
At the same moment there entered, as if by design, his very antithesis:
a short, firmly built, clerkly fellow, with a head like a billiard-ball
in need of a shave, a big brown moustache, and enormous spectacles.
"That," said the publisher, referring to the moon-in-the-pine-wood young
man, "is our young apostle of sentiment, our new man of feeling, the
best-hated man we have; and the other is our young apostle of blood. He
is all for muscle and brutality--and he makes all the money. It is one
of our many fashions just now to sing 'Britain and Brutality.' But my
impression is that our young man of feeling will have his day,--though
he will have to wait for it. He would hasten it if he would cut his
hair; but that, he says, he will never do. His hair, he says, is his
battle-cry. Well, he enjoys himself--and loves a fight, though you
mightn't think it to look at him."
A supercilious young man, with pink cheeks, and a voice which his
admirers compared to Shelley's, then came up to Henry and asked him what
he thought of Mallarme's latest sonnet; but finding Henry confessedly at
sea, turned the conversation to the Empire ballet, of which,
unfortunately, Henry knew as little.
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