The Street Called Straight | Page 2

Place, Belvoir, Leicestershire, and Olivia Margaret, only child
of Henry Guion, Esquire, of Tory Hill, Waverton, near Boston,
Massachusetts, U.S.A., no one offered warmer congratulations than the
lady in whose house the interesting pair had met. There were people
who ascribed this attitude to the fact that, being constitutionally
"game," she refused to betray her disappointment. She had been
"awfully game," they said, when poor Gerald Fane, also of the Sussex
Rangers, was cut off with enteric at Peshawur. But the general opinion
was to the effect that, not wanting Rupert Ashley (for some obscure,
feminine reason) for herself, she had magnanimously bestowed him
elsewhere. Around tea-tables, and at church parade, it was said
"Americans do that," with some comment on the methods of the
transfer.
On every ground, then, Drusilla was entitled to this first look at the
presents, some of which had come from Ashley's brother officers, who
were consequently brother officers of the late Captain Fane; so that
when she telephoned saying she was afraid that they, her parents and
herself, couldn't come to dinner that evening, because a former ward of
her father's--Olivia must remember Peter Davenant!--was arriving to
stay with them for a week or two, Miss Guion had answered, "Oh,
bother! bring him along," and the matter was arranged. It was doubtful,
however, that she knew him in advance to be the Peter Davenant who
nine years earlier had had the presumption to fall in love with her; it
was still more doubtful, after she had actually shaken hands with him
and called him by name, whether she paid him the tribute of any kind
of recollection. The fact that she had seated him at her right, in the
place that would naturally be accorded to Rodney Temple, the scholarly
director of the Department of Ceramics in the Harvard Gallery of Fine
Arts, made it look as if she considered Davenant a total stranger. In the
few conventionally gracious words she addressed to him, her manner
was that of the hostess who receives a good many people in the course
of a year toward the chance guest she had never seen before and
expects never to see again.

"Twice round the world since you were last in Boston? How
interesting!" Then, as if she had said enough for courtesy, she
continued across the lights and flowers to Mrs. Fane: "Drusilla, did you
know Colonel Ashley had declined that post at Gibraltar? I'm so glad. I
should hate the Gib."
"The Gib wouldn't hate you," Mrs. Fane assured her. "You'd have a
heavenly time there. Rupert Ashley is deep in the graces of old
Bannockburn, who's in command. He's not a bad old sort, old Ban isn't,
though he's a bit of a martinet. Lady Ban is awful--a bounder in
petticoats. She looks like that."
Drusilla pulled down the corners of a large, mobile mouth, so as to
simulate Lady Bannockburn's expression, in a way that drew a laugh
from every one at the table but the host. Henry Guion remained serious,
not from natural gravity, but from inattention. He was obviously not in
a mood for joking, nor apparently for eating, since he had scarcely
tasted his soup and was now only playing with the fish. As this
corroborated what Mrs. Temple had more than once asserted to her
husband during the past few weeks, that "Henry Guion had something
on his mind," she endeavored to exchange a glance with him, but he
was too frankly enjoying the exercise of his daughter's mimetic gift to
be otherwise observant.
"And what does Colonel Ashley look like, Drucie?" he asked, glancing
slyly at Miss Guion.
"Like that," Mrs. Fane said, instantly. Straightening the corners of her
mouth and squaring her shoulders, she fixed her eyes into a stare of
severity, and stroked horizontally an imaginary mustache, keeping the
play up till her lips quivered.
"It is like him," Miss Guion laughed.
"Is he as stiff as all that?" the professor inquired.
"Not stiff," Miss Guion explained, "only dignified."

"Dignified!" Drusilla cried. "I should think so. He's just like Olivia
herself. It's perfectly absurd that those two should marry. Apart, they're
a pair of splendid specimens; united, they'll be too much of a good
thing. They're both so well supplied with the same set of virtues that
when they look at each other it'll be like seeing their own faces in a
convex mirror. It'll be simply awful."
Her voice had the luscious English intonation, in spite of its being
pitched a little too high. In speaking she displayed the superior,
initiated manner apt to belong to women who bring the flavor of
England into colonial and Indian garrison towns--a manner Drusilla
had acquired notably well, considering that not ten years previous her
life had been bounded by American