his eyes , very dark , canted elvishly upward at the outer corners and were surrounded by delicate bruises of sleeplessness , bluish and tender , giving him the look -- kizzy fancied -- of a poet who had been up all night with a candle and a quill , memorializing a beautiful lady who had fallen from the aristocracy to die penniless of a fever , perhaps in a snowbank , leaving , of course , an ethereal corpse .