ense background of this young man's light unconscious talk. For the
unconsciousness was unmistakable. Margaret was not without experience
of the transatlantic visitor who sounds loud names and evokes
reverberating connections. The poetry of Guy Dawnish's situation lay in
the fact that it was so completely a part of early associations and
accepted facts. Life was like that in England--in Wentworth of course
(where he had been sent, through his uncle's influence, for two years'
training in the neighbouring electrical works at Smedden)--in
Wentworth, though "immensely jolly," it was different. The fact that he
was qualifying to be an electrical engineer--with the hope of a
secretaryship at the London end of the great Smedden Company--that, at
best, he was returning home to a life of industrial "grind," this fact,
though avowedly a bore, did not disconnect him from that brilliant
pinnacled past, that many-faceted life in which the brightest episodes
of the whole body of English fiction seemed collectively reflected. Of
course he would have to work--younger sons' sons almost always had
to--but his uncle Askern (like Wentworth) was "immensely jolly," and
Guise always open to him, and his other uncle, the Master, a capital
old boy too--and in town he could always put up with his clever aunt,
Lady Caroline Duckett, who had made a "beastly marriage" and was
horribly poor, but who knew everybody jolly and amusing, and had always
been particularly kind to him.

It was not--and Margaret had not, even in her own thoughts, to defend
herself from the imputation--it was not what Wentworth would have
called the "material side" of her friend's situation that captivated
her. She was austerely proof against such appeals: her enthusiasms were
all of the imaginative order. What subjugated her was the unexampled
prodigality with which he poured for her the same draught of tradition
of which Wentworth held out its little teacupful. He besieged her with
a million Wentworths in one--saying, as it were: "All these are mine
for the asking--and I choose you instead!"

For this, she told herself somewhat dizzily, was what it came to--the
summing-up toward which her conscientious efforts at self-collection
had been gradually pushing her: with all this in reach, Guy Dawnish was
leaving Wentworth reluctantly.

"I _was_ a bit lonely here at first--but _now!_" And again: "It will be
jolly, of course, to see them all again--but there are some things one