the junior
partner in his character of Uncle Peter.

This was a nuance, if Peter had but known it, which Eunice Goodward
could have no more missed than she could have eaten with her knife. She
had been trained to the finer social adjustments as to a cult: Clarice's
game of persuading life to present itself with a smiling countenance,
played all in the key of personal relations. It was as if Nature, having
tried her hand at a great many ordinary persons, each with one gift of
sympathy or graciousness, had culled and compacted the best of them into
Eunice Goodward; which was precisely the case except that Peter through
his unfamiliarity with the Best Society couldn't be expected to know
that the intelligence which had put together so much perfectness was no
less calculating than that which goes to the matching of a string of
pearls. All that he got from it was precisely all that he was meant to
receive--namely, the conviction that she couldn't have charmed him so
had she not been altogether charming.

And as yet he did not know what had happened to him. He thought, when he
awoke in the morning to a new realization of the satisfactoriness of
living, that the fresh air had done it, the breath of the nearby
untrimmed forest, the loose-leaved roses pressed against the pane
beginning to give off warm odours in the sun. Then he came out on the
terrace and saw Eunice Goodward, looking like a thin slip of the morning
herself, in a blue dress buttoned close to her figure with wide white
buttons and a tiny froth of white at the short sleeves and open throat.
Across her bosom it was caught with a blue stone set in dull silver,
which served also to hold in place a rose that matched the morning tint
of her skin. She was talking with the Lessings' chauffeur as Peter came
up with her and all her accents were of dismay. They were to have driven
over to Maplemont that afternoon, she explained to Peter, for the last
of the tennis sets, and now Gilmore had just told her that the car must
go to the shop for two or three days. She was so much more charming in
the way she forgave Gilmore for her evident disappointment that he,
being a young man and troubled by a sense of moral responsibility, was
quite overcome by it.

"But, nonsense"; Peter was certain "there is always something can be
done to cars." There was, Gilmore assured him, but it took time to do
it, and to-morrow would be Sunday. "If you'd only thought to come down
in the motor yo