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 this
elect state with one of her earliest tendrils, and, climbing on by way
of New York and Washington, had chosen to do her actual flowering in a
cosmopolitan air.

He had none of the resentment the home-bred American business man
habitually feels for this kind of eccentricity. Now that he had caught
the idea, he could see at a glance, as his mind changed his metaphor,
how admirably she was suited to the tapestried European setting. He was
conscious even of something akin to pride in the triumphs she was
capable of achieving on that richly decorated world-stage, much as
though she were some compatriot prima-donna. He could see already how
well, as the wife of Lieutenant-Colonel Rupert Ashley, she would fill
the part. It had been written for her. Its strong points and its
subtleties were alike of the sort wherein she would shine.