. 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 Allegre mounted on
a dark brown powerful weight carrier; and on the other by one of
Allegre'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
Allee was not permanent. That morning when Mr. Blunt had to escort his
mother there for the gratification of her irresistible curiosity (of
which he highly disapproved) there appeared in succession, at that
woman's or girl's bridle-hand, a cavalry general in red breeches, on whom
she was smiling; a rising politician in a grey suit, who talked to her
with great animation but left her side abr