 phraseology. It meant that she would
be up and dressed by nine o'clock. This time it was not Versoy that was
commanded for attendance, but I. You may imagine how delighted I was. ...«
    It was very plain to me that Blunt was addressing himself exclusively to
Mills: Mills the mind, even more than Mills the man. It was as if Mills
represented something initiated and to be reckoned with. I, of course, could
have no such pretensions. If I represented anything it was a perfect freshness
of sensations and a refreshing ignorance, not so much of what life may give one
(as to that I had some ideas at least) but of what it really contains. I knew
very well that I was utterly insignificant in these men's eyes. Yet my attention
was not checked by that knowledge. It's true they were talking of a woman, but I
was yet at the age when this subject by itself is not of overwhelming interest.
My imagination would have been more stimulated probably by the adventures and
fortunes of a man. What kept my interest from flagging was Mr. Blunt himself.
The play of the white gleams of his smile round the suspicion of grimness of his
tone fascinated me like a moral incongruity.
    So at the age when one sleeps well indeed but does feel sometimes as if the
need of sleep were a mere weakness of a distant old age, I kept easily awake;
and in my freshness I was kept amused by the contrast of personalities, of the
disclosed facts and moral outlook with the rough initiations of my West-Indian
experience. And all these things were dominated by a feminine figure which to my
imagination had only a floating outline, now invested with the grace of
girlhood, now with the prestige of a woman; and indistinct in both these
characters. For these two men had seen her, while to me she was only being
presented, elusively, in vanishing words, in the shifting tones of an unfamiliar
voice.
    She was being presented to me now in the Bois de Boulogne at the early hour
of the ultra-fashionable world (so I understood), on a light bay bit of blood
attended on the off side by that Henry Allègre mounted on a dark brown powerful
weight carrier; and on the other by one of Allègre's acquaintances (the man had
no real friends), distinguished frequenters of that mysterious Pavilion. And so
that side of the frame in which that woman appeared to one down the perspective
of the great Allée was not permanent. That morning when Mr. Blunt had to
