She looked at her host with a new interest.  He appeared to greater advantage seen, as it were, against his proper and natural background.  And that background had the glamour of things strange, exciting, and alluring, smacking somewhat of, say, an Arabian Night’s entertainment.  Over the dining-room mantel hung a curious and colorful landscape, in which two brown girls, naked to the waist and from thence to the knees wrapped in straight, bright-colored stuff, raised their angular arms to pluck queer fruit from exotic trees.

He knew all that, she thought; he had seen that strange landscape and those brown women, and tasted the fruit they reached to pluck.  Just as he knew those tiny terra-cotta figurines over there, and that pottery which must have been made out of ruby-dust.  Just as he knew everything.  All this had been in his world, always.  A world full of things beautiful and strange.  He had had everything that she had missed.  It seemed to her that he incarnated in his proper and handsome person all the difference and the change that had come into her life.

And quite suddenly she saw Nancy Simms dusting the Baxter parlor, pausing to stand admiringly before a picture on a white-and-gold easel, that cherished picture of a house with mother-of-pearl puddles in front of it.  A derisive and impish amusement flickered like summer lightning across her face, and with an inscrutable smile she mocked the mother-of-pearl puddles and her old admiration of them.  She lifted her eyes to the painting over Berkeley Hayden’s mantel, and the smile deepened.

“Perhaps it is her smile,” thought he, watching her.  “Yes, I am sure it must be her smile.  I am rather glad Marcia is taking her abroad.  I do not wish to make a fool of myself, and there’d be that danger if she remained.”  Yet the idea of her absence gave him an unaccustomed pang.

He filled her quarters aboard ship with exquisite flowers.  She was not yet used to graceful attentions, they had been for other women, not for her.  She had no idea at all that she was of the slightest importance, if only because of the Champneys money; her comparative freedom was still too recent for her to have changed her estimate of herself.  She thought it touchingly kind and thoughtful of this handsome, important man to have remembered just her, particularly when there wasn’t anybody else to do so, and she looked at him with a pleased and appreciative friendliness for which he felt absurdly grateful.  While Marcia was busied with the other friends who had come to see her off, he stood beside Mrs. Champneys, who seemed to know no one but himself, and this established a measure of intimacy between them.

“It occurs to me,” said he, tentatively, “that it has been some time since I saw Florence.  All of two or three years.”

They stood together by the railing, and she leaned forward the better to watch a leggy little girl with a brickdust-red pigtail in a group on the pier.