He had seen many well-bred women on social pinnacles look like that, whose houses were at present barred against him.

The Pratt sisters were fixed into their smartness as some faces are fixed into a grin.

It was not spontaneous, fugitive, evanescent as a smile, gracefully worn, or lightly laid aside, as in Hester's case.

He had known Hester slightly in London for several years.

He had seen her on terms of intimacy, such as she never showed to his sisters, with inaccessible men and women with whom he had achieved a bare acquaintance, but whom, in spite of many carefully concealed advances, he had found it impossible to know better.
Captain Pratt had reached that stage in his profession of raising himself when he had become a social barometer.