A Fair Fraud — page 85: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

7A A Fair Fraud parents until to-day. He was a striking-look- ing man, tall and dark and thin. He was smooth shaven, with keen brown eyes and rather a prominent nose, and a cast of face that was clever rather than handsome. He affected men’s society, and lived much at his club, and he looked upon women as a necessary but somewhat tiresome element of life, the bent of his mind being eminently practical and serious, and wholly averse to the frivolities of feminine society. It was, therefore, as he had said truthfully, absolutely immat: rial to him whom he took in to dinner. Some sort of conversa- tion, no doubt, would be expected of him, and as he was a well-mannered man and accustomed to the usages of polite society, he was quite prepared to do what was necessary in the matter, but as to caring one jot whether the lady he had to be civil to was a Mrs or a Miss, a countess or a companion, that really could not be expected of him! Nevertheless he must have been human, for he was distinctly conscious of the fact that the lady he escorted into the dining-room was a pretty girl in white muslin. Now Mr Naylor had a secret weakness for white muslin; he considered it simple and artless, and believed it to be inexpensive, after the common belief of the ignorant male being. It was agreeable to him to look at GOMMGIOO Sp! C(O)