manly figure, on which
the delicately tied cravat sat with the elegance of an orchid, while the
white waistcoat, of the latest and most youthful cut, was as neatly
adjusted to the person as the calyx to a bud. The mere sight of so much
ease and distinction made Davenant himself feel like a rustic in his
Sunday clothes, though he seized the opportunity of being in such
company to enlarge his perception of the fine points of bearing. It was
an improving experience of a kind which he only occasionally got.

He had an equal sense of the educational value of the conversation, to
which, as it skipped from country to country and from one important name
to another, it was a privilege to be a listener. His own career--except
for his two excursions round the world, conscientiously undertaken in
pursuit of knowledge--had been so somberly financial that he was
frankly, and somewhat naively, curious concerning the people who "did
things" bearing little or no relation to business, and who permitted
themselves sensations merely for the sake of having them. Olivia Guion's
friends, and Drusilla Fane's--admirals, generals, colonels, ambassadors,
and secretaries of embassy they apparently were, for the most part--had
what seemed to him an unwonted freedom of dramatic action. Merely to
hear them talked about gave him glimpses of a world varied and
picturesque, from the human point of view, beyond his dreams. In the
exchange of scraps of gossip and latest London anecdotes between Miss
Guion and Drusilla Fane, on which Henry Guion commented, Davenant felt
himself to be looking at a vivid but fitfully working cinematograph, of
which the scenes were snatched at random from life as lived anywhere
between Washington and Simla, or Inverness and Rome. The effect was both
instructive and entertaining. It was also in its way enlightening, since
it showed him the true standing in the world of this woman whom he had
once, for a few wild minutes, hoped to make his wife.

The dinner was half over before he began clearly to detach Miss Guion
from that environment which he would have called "the best Boston
society." Placing her there, he would have said before this evening that
he placed her as high as the reasonable human being could aspire to be
set. For any one whose roots were in Waverton, "the best Boston society"
would in general be taken as the state of blossoming. It came to him as
a discovery, made there and then, that Olivia Guion had seized th