My imagination would have been more stimulated probably by the adventures and fortunes of a man.

What kept my interest from flagging was Mr.Blunt himself.

The play of the white gleams of his smile round the suspicion of grimness of his tone fascinated me like a moral incongruity.
So at the age when one sleeps well indeed but does feel sometimes as if the need of sleep were a mere weakness of a distant old age, I kept easily awake; and in my freshness I was kept amused by the contrast of personalities, of the disclosed facts and moral outlook with the rough initiations of my West-Indian experience.

And all these things were dominated by a feminine figure which to my imagination had only a floating outline, now invested with the grace of girlhood, now with the prestige of a woman; and indistinct in both these characters.

For these two men had _seen_ her, while to me she was only being "presented," elusively, in vanishing words, in the shifting tones of an unfamiliar voice.
She was being presented to me now in the Bois de Boulogne at the early hour of the ultra-fashionable world (so I understood), on a light bay "bit of blood" attended on the off side by that Henry Allegre mounted on a dark brown powerful weight carrier; and on the other by one of Allegre's acquaintances (the man had no real friends), distinguished frequenters of that mysterious Pavilion.