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.
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