In her limousine she seemed smaller,
more lost in her fate and money, than before. She resembled a crushed
and lovely flower; and Lee reflected that it was a shame no one was
there to revive her. Mina Raff, at the Plaza, insisted, holding his
hand in a mingled thoughtfulness and pictorial misery, on sending him
to the Groves'; and his last glimpse of her, over his shoulder, was of
a slight figure hurled into upper expensive mansions by an express
elevator.
A car not the Groves' was outside their house; and, as Lee was passing
the drawing-room doors, William Grove called him in. He found there a
Dr. Davencott and his wife, obviously on terms of close intimacy with
the house. The physician was a thickly-built man with an abrupt manner
continually employed in sallies of a vigorous but not unkindly humor.
Lee gathered that his practice was large and select; and he quickly saw
the reason, the explanation, of this: Dr. Davencott had carried the
tonic impatience of earlier years among inconsequential people into a
sphere where bullying was a novelty with a direct traceable salutary
effect. But whatever harshness was visible in him was tempered by his
wife, who was New England, Boston itself, at its best. She had a grave
charm, a wit, rather than humor, which irradiated her seriousness, and
gave even her tentative remarks an air of valuable finality.
To this Mrs.
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