you used to care about once, or you said you did—character. And I would never care about any man who hadn’t it.”
And Davenport Carr, clever as he was, overlooked the fact that they might not be thinking the same ingredients into that term.
He was reassured and went down to dinner feeling that Dane Barrington, with his fine social sense, must understand well enough the social gulf that existed between a man who could not be asked out to dinner and a girl bred in the select precincts of the Remuera set.
Something about that dinner party amused Valerie enormously and roused Dane. The spectacle of Mac and Davenport Carr side by side was in itself subject for comedy. Each of them was an autocrat in his own fashion, and each of them appreciated the eminence of the other in his own profession, recognized his authority, and would obey it in his given domain. Mac was as sublimely easy as his turned-up shirt sleeves and split vest indicated. The gentleman never lived who could overawe him, and Davenport Carr, despising sycophancy while ever ready to use it, thoroughly enjoyed the independence of spirit that glared at him out of those hard blue eyes. And he was amusedly aware of Mac’s great hairy arms, of his fat, red hands cleverly carving the chicken, of his enormous head and shoulders, of his curious poise, and of the contrast he made to Dane on the other side of him.
Within a minute or two after they sat down Dane took charge of the conversation by a kind of divine right universally acknowledged. The sight of steaming chickens and bottles of champagne was all that was necessary to start him, and after one or two drinks he was off.
Valerie watched the responsiveness grow between him and her father, the one stimulating the other. And as she
