The prince did not reply to my salute.

He was smoking, and kept his cigar in one corner of his mouth, as if he were a master fencer bidding his pupil to come on.

He assumed that he had to do with a bourgeois Briton unused to arms, such as we are generally held to be on the Continent.

After feeling my wrist for a while he shook the cigar out of his teeth.
The 'cliquetis' of the crossed steel must be very distant in memory, and yourself in a most dilettante frame of mind, for you to be accessible to the music of that thin skeleton's clank.

Nevertheless, it is better and finer even at the time of action, than the abominable hollow ogre's eye of the pistol-muzzle.