Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/144



ETROIT society is old and staid. Its traditions run back to the English occupation—even back of that to the French—but they run also forward to the new crop of motor millionaires, and there were always new people breaking in. Among these climbers this season there appeared eventually a smooth, symmetrical young man of twenty-six or seven, whose presence began to be noted quite regularly at dinners, dances, whist parties, and the like—a young person with regular features, a black comb-back, an olive skin that was ruddy in the high lights, a pair of dark but light-filled eyes, and a determined mouth which smiled easily—what romantically-minded women are apt to call a dark, interesting face.

His manners lacked the easy assurance of those to the habit born; yet they lacked it only in confidence of execution. That would come with practice. He seemed instinctively to say the right thing and to do the right thing; and, in a society where young men from sheer arrogance of birth were sometimes apt to be too bold, too impudently sure of themselves, a certain shy-