‘Bright eyes’ implies a warm, sparkling, engaging personality until you slam up against ‘rather like glass grapes’, and then you move into something vacuous and apart. I happen to like the miles-away half-mad gaze with which sheep and goats stare at you, but more frighteningly, this could equally describe an android concierge, programmed to bare ceramic teeth in a grimace of welcome.

Rather a ewe bleating at me from behind the reception counter.

Russell Hoban has a similar description of the vacant gaze of a goat.

‘The ewe had bright eyes, rather like glass grapes.’

Source: Vasily Grossman, An Armenian Sketchbook, trans. Robert and Elizabeth Chandler, New York: New York Review Books, 2013, p. 37

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