This accomplished dandy seemed to be thirty years of age.

His manners were those of good society; he wore jewels of value; the collar of his shirt came to the tops of his ears.

His conceited and even impertinent air betrayed a consciousness of hidden superiority.

His pallid face seemed bloodless, his thin flat nose had the sardonic expression which we see in a death's head, and his green eyes were inscrutable; their glance was discreet in meaning just as the thin closed mouth was discreet in words.
The first man seemed on the whole a good fellow compared with this younger man, who was slashing the air with a cane, the top of which, made of gold, glittered in the sunshine.

The first man might have cut off a head with his own hand, but the second was capable of entangling innocence, virtue, and beauty in the nets of calumny and intrigue, and then poisoning them or drowning them.