“You would advise me to be on my guard against him, because, although I look twenty-five and experienced, I am only nineteen and inexperienced.  Thank you.”

He paused to light another cigarette before he followed her across the turf.  But she had the incomprehensible feminine satisfaction of knowing, as they walked homeward, that the usual serenity of his disposition was slightly ruffled.

A sudden caprice impelled her, in the privacy of her bedroom that evening, to draw his portrait for Peter Erwin.  The complacency of New York men was most amusing, she wrote, and the amount of slang they used would have been deemed vulgar in St. Louis.  Nevertheless, she liked people to be sure of themselves, and there was something “insolent” about New York which appealed to her.  Peter, when he read that letter, seemed to see Mr. Howard Spence in the flesh; or arrayed, rather, in the kind of cloth alluringly draped in the show-windows of fashionable tailors.  For Honora, all unconsciously, wrote literature.  Literature was invented before phonographs, and will endure after them.  Peter could hear Mr. Spence talk, for a part of that gentleman’s conversation—­a characteristic part—­was faithfully transcribed.  And Peter detected a strain of admiration running even through the ridicule.

Peter showed that letter to Aunt Mary, whom it troubled, and to Uncle Tom, who laughed over it.  There was also a lifelike portrait of the Vicomte, followed by the comment that he was charming, but very French; but the meaning of this last, but quite obvious, attribute remained obscure.  He was possessed of one of the oldest titles and one of the oldest chateaux in France. (Although she did not say so, Honora had this on no less authority than that of the Vicomte himself.) Mrs. Holt—­with her Victorian brooch and ear-rings and her watchful delft-blue eyes that somehow haunted one even when she was out of sight, with her ample bosom and the really kind heart it contained—­was likewise depicted; and Mr. Holt, with his dried bread, and his garden which Honora wished Uncle Tom could see, and his prayers that lacked imagination.  Joshua and his cows, Robert and his forest, Susan and her charities, the Institution, jolly Mrs. Joshua and enigmatical Mrs. Robert—­all were there:  and even a picture of the dinner-party that evening, when Honora sat next to a young Mr. Patterson with glasses and a studious manner, who knew George Hanbury at Harvard.  The other guests were a florid Miss Chamberlin, whose person loudly proclaimed possessions, and a thin Miss Longman, who rented one of the Silverdale cottages and sketched.

Honora was seeing life.  She sent her love to Peter, and begged him to write to her.