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"I don't understand Oscar's embarrassment in speaking to you. As you interpret him, what had he to be afraid of?" She smiled satirically. "What has become of your memory, my dear?" she asked. "What were you afraid of? You certainly never said a word to me of this poor man's deformity. On one side, my dislike of dark colors and dark people warned Oscar to hold his tongue.
One of the first things that strikes the attention when the white sheet of winter is withdrawn is the neglect and disarray that lay hidden beneath it. Nature is not cleanly according to our prejudices. The beauty of preceding years, now transformed to brown and blighted deformity, obstructs the brightening loveliness of the present hour.
Sinister, cringing, repulsive; her face livid with the reflection from the weapon that was her support, and her figure scarcely human in the rugged garments that encompassed its gaunt proportions, she seemed a deformity set up by evil spirits to mock the majesty of the human form an embodied satire on all that is most deplorable in infirmity and most disgusting in age.
The deformity, that clothed a very beautiful soul in La Boetie, was of this predicament: that superficial ugliness, which nevertheless is always the most imperious, is of least prejudice to the state of the mind, and of little certainty in the opinion of men. The other, which is never properly called deformity, being more substantial, strikes deeper in.
From this point of view his mental deformity seems not unlike that of Cavendish's, later, except that in the case of Cavendish it manifested itself as an abnormal sensitiveness instead of an abnormal irritability. Huygens was the descendant of a noble and distinguished family, his father, Sir Constantine Huygens, being a well-known poet and diplomatist.
Deformity was the rule, beauty the exception. Even amongst those who were called handsome there were scarcely any who fulfilled every condition of the beautiful. A critical observer would have found defects in the beauty of the features, in the form, in the foot, the leg, the arm, the hand, the fingers, the teeth, the neck, the throat, the head, the hair, the complexion, the contour, the carriage.
There were parish schools also perhaps others; and off some dark alley, in a room on the ground-floor, could be heard the strident noise of education going on in high-voiced study and recitation. Nor were amusements lacking notices of balls, dancing this evening, and ten-cent shows in palaces of legerdemain and deformity.
Leave her with me a little longer. She was like a child to me till yesterday. Why did you step in and make her mock my deformity and old age?"
Such was his dislike of their mother, on account of a slight deformity, that for four or five years he shamefully maltreated her, and at last shut her up in this dungeon-keep, allowing her daily the most meagre diet possible. "When, some few days since, the royal stewards appeared in front of the moat, and claimed admittance, the Count was much alarmed," added the peasant woman.
"Then give us the wretched production, in all its hideous deformity!" And the girls all laugh so sympathetically, and Bob joins them so gently, and yet with a tone, I know, that can be changed so quickly to my further discomfiture, that I arise at once and read, without apology or excuse, this primitive and very callow poem recovered here to-day from the gilded roll: A BACKWARD LOOK
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