Work, travel, and a widened knowledge of
men and manners had so ripened Davenant's mind that he was able to see
his proposal now as Miss Guion must have seen it then, as something so
incongruous and absurd as not only to need no consideration, but to call
for no reply. Nevertheless, it was the refusal on her part of a reply,
of the mere laconic No which was all that, in his heart of hearts, he
had ever expected, that rankled in him longest; but even that
mortification had passed, as far as he knew, into the limbo of extinct
regrets. For her present superb air of having no recollection of his
blunder he had nothing but commendation. It was as becoming to the
spirited grace of its wearer as a royal mantle to a queen. Carrying it
as she did, with an easy, preoccupied affability that enabled her to
look round him and over him and through him, to greet him and converse
with him, without seeming positively to take in the fact of his
existence, he was permitted to suppose the incident of their previous
acquaintance, once so vital to himself, to have been forgotten. If this
were so, it would be nothing very strange, since a woman of
twenty-seven, who has had much social experience, may be permitted to
lose sight of the more negligible of the conquests she has made as a
girl of eighteen.
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