without any rough-and-tumble loss of gentility.  It required little or nothing in the way of pleadings in the courts or disputing in the market-place, and—­especially during the lifetime of the elder partners—­left him 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 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 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.