A foe
to marriage, compassionating Carrigaholt as doomed to travel
"Vetturini-wise," pitying the Dead Sea goatherd for his ugly wife,
revelling in the meek surrender of the three young men whom he sees
"led to the altar" in Suez, he is still the frank, susceptible,
gallant bachelor, observantly and critically studious of female
charms: of the magnificent yet formidable Smyrniotes, eyes, brow,
nostrils, throat, sweetly turned lips, alarming in their latent
capacity for fierceness, pride, passion, power: of the Moslem
women in Nablous, "so handsome that they could not keep up their
yashmaks:" of Cypriote witchery in hair, shoulder-slope,
tempestuous fold of robe. He opines as he contemplates the plain,
clumsy Arab wives that the fine things we feel and say of women
apply only to the good-looking and the graceful: his memory
wanders off ever and again to the muslin sleeves and bodices and
"sweet chemisettes" in distant England. In hands sensual and
vulgar the allusions might have been coarse, the dilatings
unseemly; but the "taste which is the feminine of genius," the
self-respecting gentleman-like instinct, innocent at once and
playful, keeps the voluptuary out of sight, teaches, as Imogen
taught Iachimo, "the wide difference 'twixt amorous and
villainous.
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