“I don’t care.  I believe he thinks about it,” insisted Janet, who would never surrender a point after she had once made it.

“He’s different, anyhow,” said Hatty, the one who had everything, as her mother asserted, to make her pretty, and yet wasn’t.  “He isn’t nearly so normal.  Is he, Mother?”

Mrs. Culpeper raised troubled eyes from the skirt of her pale gray silk gown which she was scrutinizing dejectedly.  “How on earth could I have got that spot there?” she remarked in her brisk yet soft voice.  “I am afraid you are right, dear, about Stephen.  He certainly hasn’t been like himself for some time.  I have felt really anxious, I suppose it was the war.”

While the war had lasted she had seen it, according to her habit of vision, with peculiar intentness, and she had seen nothing else; but from the beginning to the end, it had appeared to her mainly as an international disturbance which had upset the serene and regular course of her family affairs.  For the past two years she had refused to think of it except under pressure; and then she recalled it only as the occasion when Victoria and Stephen had been in France, and poor Peyton in a training camp.  Her feeling had been violent, but entirely personal, while Mr. Culpeper, who possessed the martial patriotism characteristic of Virginians of his class and generation, had been animated by the sacrificial spirit of a hero.

“Oh, Stephen is all right,” declared Peyton, who felt impelled to take the side of his brother in a family discussion.  He was an incurious and gay young man, of active sporting interests and immaculate appearance, with so few of the moral attributes of the Culpepers that his mother sometimes wondered how he could possibly be the son of his father.  Indeed there were times when this wonder extended to Mary Byrd, for it seemed incredible that anything so “advanced” as the outlook of these two should have been a legitimate offspring of either the Culpeper or the Warwick point of view.

“He would be all right,” maintained Janet, “if he would only marry Margaret.  I am sure she likes him.”

“Oh, I don’t know.  There’s that young clergyman,” rejoined Hatty, “and Margaret is so pious.  I suppose that’s why she has never been popular with men.”

“My dear child,” breathed Mrs. Culpeper in remonstrance, and she added emphatically, as if the doubt were a disparagement of Stephen’s attractions, “Of course she likes him.  Why, it would be a perfectly splendid marriage for Margaret Blair.”

“It isn’t possible,” asked Mary Byrd, for if her manners were modern, her prejudices were old-fashioned, “that Stephen could have met any one else over there?” She was wearing an elaborate, very short and very low gown of pink velvet, not one of the simple blue or gray silk dresses, with modest round necks, in which her sisters attired themselves in the evening.  A little later she and Peyton would go on to a dance; for her mother’s