Customizing the color of line highlight

[Philip]

How can I customize the color of line highlighting? I am using Emacs
21 with hl-line.el to highlight the current line, on a 256-color
xterm. I have:

(setq hl-line-face 'hl-line)
(global-hl-line-mode t) ; turn it on for all modes by default

And I tried:

(defface hl-line '((t (:background "gray90")))
    "Face to use for `hl-line-face'." :group 'hl-line)

(set-face-background 'highlight "#eee")

(set-face-background 'highlight "goldenrod yellow")

But it's still the default gray, which is too dark on a white
background. M-x list-colors-display shows all the colors fine.