"Then I shall leave you. Mrs. Le Roy is giving a dinner-party this evening, and she invariably has guests who listen charmingly. Good-night, Sylvester."
"Good-night, sir."
When he was gone, William Sylvester scratched his thinly covered head. He then shrugged his shoulders, and followed this action by pouring out a glass of sherry. He took a sip. "'Eavens!" he said aloud; "'ow 'e do talk!"
II
Montague leaned back in the taxicab and, enjoying that sense of contentment almost invariably engendered by a smooth-running vehicle, allowed his mind to browse in the meadows of memory.
It was a process which gave him considerable pleasure, for he was a man who respected his own accomplishments—though given to satirical comment on those of others. Satisfaction with his past had bred in him a contentment with the present…. And he never doubted the future; for was not to-morrow merely to-day carried on?
There were many reasons tending towards his peace of mind. One: that he was twenty-eight years of age. At such a period in a man's life he meets older men on a footing of equality, and younger men with patronage. Women of all ages admire him, and their husbands ask him to lunch at their clubs. There is no age more gratifying to the vanity.
The man of twenty-eight is an Ambassador of Youth meeting the Plenipotentiaries of Age as an equal.
Unfortunately for Dennis Montague, he allowed his own excellent opinion of himself to deepen with the admiration of others until it completely outstripped all rivals. At twenty-six he had his first great love affair—with himself. At twenty-eight it had ripened into a sort of reverence. Occasionally he flirted with women, but such incidents were mere inconstancies, peccadillos, which never seriously threatened his own overwhelming affaire d'amour.
Born in Ottawa, Dennis was the son of an ambitious mother and a high-placed Government official. Educated for the law, he had applied a dexterous intellect to that noble and musty study, and had succeeded in having himself called to the Bar when he was twenty-three. Up to that time he had known no other civilization than that found in the capital of his native land, where a peer of the realm, graciously appointed by the Imperial Government to act as interpreter between the Mother Country and the Dominion of Canada, regularly spends his appointed term at the Government House, thereby stimulating Ottawa's social activities to fever-heat. It even produces a philosophy of its own among the capital's tuft-hunters. For, even if this governor-general doesn't ask us to dinner, there's always a chance that the next one will.