In this respect he was fortunate in knowing exactly what he wanted.  That is, he had seen enough of the duties of high position to be critical of the ladies who performed them.  Experience enabled him to create his ideal by a process of elimination.  Many a time, as he watched some great general’s wife—­Lady Englemere, let us say, or Lady Bannockburn—­receive her guests, he said to himself, “That is exactly what my wife shall not be.”  She should not be a military intrigante like the one, nor a female martinet like the other, nor a gambler like a third, nor a snob like a fourth, nor a fool about young men like several he could think of.  By dint of fastidious observation and careful rejection of the qualities of which he disapproved, a vision rose before him of the woman who would be the complement of himself.  He saw her clever, spirited, high-bred—­a woman of the world, familiar with literature and arts, and speaking at least one language besides her mother-tongue.  In dress she should be exquisite, in conversation tactful, in manner sympathetic.  As mistress of the house she should be thorough; as a hostess, full of charm; as a mother—­but his imagination hardly went into that.  That she should be a perfect mother he took for granted, just as he took it for granted that she should be beautiful.  A woman who had the qualifications he desired could not be less than beautiful from the sheer operation of the soul.

Considering how definite his ideas were—­and moderate, on the whole—­it surprised him to find no one to embody them.  It sometimes seemed to him that the traditional race of Englishwomen had become extinct.  Those he met were either brilliant and hard, or handsome and horsey, or athletic and weedy, or smart and selfish, or pretty and silly, or sweet and provincial, or good and grotesque.  With the best will in the world to fall in love, he found little or no temptation.  Indeed, he had begun to think that the type of woman on whom he had set his heart was, like some article of an antiquated fashion, no longer produced when unexpectedly he saw her.

He saw her unexpectedly, because it was at church; and whatever his motives on that bright Sunday morning in May in attending the old garrison chapel in Southsea, the hope of seeing his vision realized was not one.  If, apart from the reasons for which people are supposed to go to church, he had any special thought, it was that of meeting Mrs. Fane.  It had happened two or three times already that, having perceived her at the service, he had joined her on the Common afterward, and she had asked him home to lunch.  They had been pleasant little luncheons—­so pleasant that he almost regretted the fact that she was an American.  He had nothing against Americans in themselves.  He knew a number of their women who had married into one arm or another of the Service with conspicuous advantage to their husbands.  That, in fact, was part of the trouble.  There were so many of them