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Beginning with Francois II., the architectural form of the edifice effaces itself more and more, and allows the geometrical form, like the bony structure of an emaciated invalid, to become prominent. The fine lines of art give way to the cold and inexorable lines of geometry. An edifice is no longer an edifice; it is a polyhedron.
It was long barrel-shaped; it shrank to a sphere, then broadened laterally, and again extended above and below. In turn it was a sphere, a disk, a pyramid, a pentahedron, a polyhedron. It possessed neither legs, flippers, nor tentacles; but out from its heaving, shrinking body it would send, now from one spot, now from another, an active arm, or feeler, with which it swam, pulled, or pushed.
Considering the surface of the globe as a polyhedron, formed of planes variously inclined, we may conceive by the mere inspection of the maps, that the intersection of these slopes, rising towards the north, the west, and south,* between San Fernando de Apure, Caycara, and the mouth of the Meta, must cause a considerable depression.
He was tall, like his father, but there the resemblance paused. The promoter's shifty blue eyes were always at the point of lighting up with enthusiasm; the son's, of precisely the same hue, were cold and calmly calculating. The human polyhedron has as many facets as a curiously-cut gem, and Vincent Farley's gift lay in the ability always to present the same side to the same person.
Let the reader picture to himself a series of visages presenting successively all geometrical forms, from the triangle to the trapezium, from the cone to the polyhedron; all human expressions, from wrath to lewdness; all ages, from the wrinkles of the new-born babe to the wrinkles of the aged and dying; all religious phantasmagories, from Faun to Beelzebub; all animal profiles, from the maw to the beak, from the jowl to the muzzle.
All mysterious providences, misfortunes, dispensations, evils, and wrong things generally, are attributable to this cause, namely, that round people get into three-cornered holes, and three-cornered people get into round holes." The librarian is not only a three-cornered person, but a many-cornered one, a human polyhedron.
Then the vision of coming woe in exile from beloved calculations descended upon her, and she hugged the paper figures so convulsively that the sharpest, most beautiful angle of the biggest polyhedron cracked clear across from edge to edge. They were perfectly splendid clean edges, edges that even I could see had been formed by the carefully loving hands of a mathematical prodigy.
His attitude toward Ardea had always been a pose; but it was a pose maintained so faithfully that it had become one of the facets of the polyhedron. Such men do not love, as a woman defines love; they merely have the mating instinct. And even lust finds a cold hearth in such hearts, though on occasion it will rake the embers together and make shift to blow them into some brief, fierce flame.
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