leisure for cultivating that graceful relationship to life for which he
possessed aptitudes. It was a high form of gracefulness, making it a
matter of course that he should figure on the Boards of Galleries of
Fine Arts and Colleges of Music, and other institutions meant to
minister to his country's good through the elevation of its taste.

"It's the sort of thing he was cut out for," Davenant commented to
himself, as his eye traveled from the high-bred face, where refinement
blended with authority, to the essentially gentlemanly 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 naïvely, 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