CHAPTER I.
When the porter's wife, who used to answer the house-bell, announced "A gentleman and a lady, sir," I had, as I often had in those days--the wish being father to the thought--an immediate vision of sitters.
Sitters my visitors in this case proved to be; but not in the sense I should have preferred.

There was nothing at first however to indicate that they mightn't have come for a portrait.

The gentleman, a man of fifty, very high and very straight, with a moustache slightly grizzled and a dark grey walking-coat admirably fitted, both of which I noted professionally--I don't mean as a barber or yet as a tailor--would have struck me as a celebrity if celebrities often were striking.

It was a truth of which I had for some time been conscious that a figure with a good deal of frontage was, as one might say, almost never a public institution.

A glance at the lady helped to remind me of this paradoxical law: she also looked too distinguished to be a "personality." Moreover one would scarcely come across two variations together.
Neither of the pair immediately spoke--they only prolonged the preliminary gaze suggesting that each wished to give the other a chance.
They were visibly shy; they stood there letting me take them in--which, as I afterwards perceived, was the most practical thing they could have done.