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Anyone looking at Clive—anyone with a discerning eye—would have said that unless he were a soldier he might well be a poet. So his mother thought, as she had often thought, on that Saturday afternoon when, drawing her hand within his arm, he led her away from The Crofts, where Hester and her friends still computed and measured. He carried himself like a soldier—that was his inheritance from Charlie, and the little twist that his injured thigh had given to his gait lent it a jauntiness that added to rather than detracted from the resolute blitheness of his bearing. Objectivity was a soldierly quality and Clive’s expression—so much more aware of you than of himself—was objective. And with these disciplined and valiant characteristics went the almost unearthly beauty; eyes bright as clear grey water; hair swept to silver-gilt ripples, like a young archangel’s; a head with its fragile, forcible structure, to be bound by the laurels of a Greek fillet or bend from a background of swift, beneficent pinions. Yes; a beneficent archangel; but an archangel bearing a sword. There was something about Clive that frightened her a little at moments.