The Street Called Straight | Page 6

should have nothing to do, on
leaving the university, but walk into the excellent legal practice his
grandfather had founded, and his father had brought to a high degree of
honor as well as to a reasonable pitch of prosperity. It was, from the
younger Guion's point of view, an agreeable practice, concerned chiefly
with the care of trust funds, in which a gentleman could engage 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 naïvely, 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.

He had none of the resentment the home-bred American business man
habitually feels for this kind of eccentricity. Now that he had caught the
idea, he could see at a glance, as his mind changed his metaphor, how
admirably she was suited to the tapestried European setting. He was
conscious even of something akin to pride in the triumphs she was
capable of achieving on that richly decorated world-stage, much as
though she were some compatriot prima-donna. He could see already
how well, as the wife of Lieutenant-Colonel Rupert Ashley, she would
fill the part. It had been written for her. Its strong points and its
subtleties were alike of the sort wherein she would shine.
This perception of his own inward applause explained something in
regard to himself about which he had been wondering ever since the
beginning of dinner--the absence of any pang, of any shade of envy, to
see another man win where he had been so ignominiously defeated. He
saw