Sir William Ware was a stroller, with hands in pockets, on the veranda of the world. It is true that he was a bank president; but the position, even more honorary than bank presidencies usually are, gave him as little work or concern as his several other business connections of the same kind. Agents did the worrying; Sir William merely spent the money, or as much of it as a bachelor of quiet tastes required. A large unused portion of his income was reinvested each year. The principal thus grew instead of shrank; and Sir William, as he put it, had long ago "quite given up hope of ever being able to die a pauper."
Sir William had a large library, but seldom read books. He reserved his seats seasonally at the theatre, but seldom attended shows. Life itself was the novel he read and the drama he watched. A man who has those two things most people want most—money, and social prestige and power—and has remained so far unspoiled by having them, that he knows keenly and wisely wherein they are valuable and wherein worthless: such a man is apt to develop a humorous contempt for the book and drama as interpreters of life, when he compares chapter or act with his experience of the real thing.
Ware had the highest social status, both by birth—which counts for little in the West—and by innate qualification, which counts everywhere in desirable circles. A patrician, innately so in the sense of being a gentleman as well as a thoroughbred, is seldom spoiled by being born wealthy. Sir William, who had enjoyed but never either misused or wasted his money; and who, welcomed in any social circle, was yet a friend of man everywhere, would have liked, if it had been possible, to have helped everybody to enjoyment of the same things he enjoyed. He wanted to see everybody with "a guinea he could spend." He wanted to see everybody a friend to everybody else.
Although the women, both young and old, in the circles where Ware moved had demonstrated to themselves, by trying every rivet in his celibate harness, that as far as they were concerned he was an immovable, immutable and foreordained bachelor, it was an odd fact that he had never in his own mind given up either the intention or the hope that there would some day be a Lady Ware—the kind he wanted.
These were a few of the qualities the future Lady Ware must have: Physically, she must be perfect, and of vigorous health. She must have an instinctive sophistication: an innocent girl would be flavorless. She must be frank, but not rude. She must be perennially alive and merry. She must, above all, be new material—that is, young enough not to be hardened against impress.
In his quest for a wife—or rather, in his unsuspected but ever-present matrimonial vigilance—Sir William had followed a course exactly opposite to the usual one. That is to say, instead of seeking out some woman or maiden of his circle who seemed outwardly qualified, and then analyzing her under the microscope of a long and intimate acquaintance, he first thought up the qualities he wished his future wife to possess, and then synthesized them into an imaginary Eve who abode always in his brain and was the pattern, vague, perhaps, as to actual form and feature, but palpable enough in all essentials, of the female Sir William Ware proposed to discover and marry.
When he found her, there would be no "shilly-shallying." There never had been, when a Ware found anything he particularly wanted. He would marry her "straightaway." Sir William could conceive of no obstacle. The chance that Fate would play him the trick of showing him his ideal in another man's wife was, he decided, too remote to be considered.
* * * * *
Some two hours after Daisy's appearance in the Harrison dining-room, Jean the Scotch cook, drinking tea with Daisy in the kitchen, reached out and opened the door in answer to a knock like a steam-hammer. In the doorway stood a small, shrewd-faced, grinning boy.
"Some guy out under them trees at the gate," he said, "wants 'a have a word', as he calls it, wit' that jane," indicating Daisy with a jerk of his head.