a house she could remember had altogether disappeared; a new one had replaced it that before long might be replaced by a newer still.  To Olivia the consoling thought was precisely in this state of transition, to which rapid vicissitude, for better or for worse, was something like a law.  It made the downfall of her own family less exceptional, less bitter, when viewed as part of a huge impermanency, shifting from phase to phase, with no rule to govern it but the necessities of its own development.

Until this minute it was the very element in American life she had found most distasteful.  Her inclinations, carefully fostered by her parents, had always been for the solid, the well-ordered, the assured, evolved from precedent to precedent till its conventions were fixed and its doings regulated as by a code of etiquette.  Now, all of a sudden, she perceived that life in shirt-sleeves possessed certain advantages over a well-bred existence in full dress.  It allowed the strictly human qualities an easier sort of play.  Where there was no pretense at turning to the world a smooth, impeccable social front, toil and suffering, misfortune and disgrace, became things to be less ashamed of.  Practically every one in these unpretentious, tree-shaded houses knew what it was to struggle upward, with many a slip backward in the process and sometimes a crashing fall from the top.  These accidents were understood.  The result was the creation of a living atmosphere, not perhaps highly civilized, but highly sympathetic, charged with the comprehension of human frailty, into which one could carry one’s dishonor, not wholly with equanimity, but at least with the knowledge that such burdens were not objects for astonishment.  As she descended the hill, therefore, she felt, as she had never felt before, the comforting assurance of being among brethren, before whom she should not have the wearisome task of “keeping up appearances,” and by whom she would be supported, even at the worst, through a fellow-feeling with her cares.

This consciousness helped her to be firm when, a few minutes later, having reached the dike by the border of the Charles, she came face to face with Peter Davenant.  She saw him from a long way off, but without recognition.  She noticed him only as an unusually tall figure, in a summery gray suit and a gray felt hat.  He was sauntering in a leisurely way toward her, stopping now and then to admire some beautiful dog sniffing the scent of water-rats in the weeds, or a group of babies tumbling on the sand, or a half-naked undergraduate sculling along the serpentine reaches of the river, or a college crew cleaving the waters with the precision of an arrow, to a long, rhythmic swing of eight slim bodies and a low, brief grunt of command.  The rich October light striking silvery gleams from the walls of the Stadium and burnished gold from the far-off dome of the State House brought all the hues of fire from the rim of autumnal hills on the western horizon.