“Did you enjoy yourself?” she asked cheerfully.  Tell me about it.”

“Oh, it was rather jolly,” he replied, and she knew that this was as much as she should ever get out of him.  Beyond a few stock phrases, words hardly existed for him at all, or existed only in foreign languages, for, having been educated abroad, he spoke French and German fluently, if without felicity.  Already his inarticulateness was like an encumbering veil between them—­a veil in which she struggled as helplessly as a moth in a net.  And only a month ago she had believed that the very immensity of his nature rendered him dumb.

“Then you had better hurry, dear.  Dinner is at eight, and you have only a minute.”

“You go down and tell them not to wait.  I was detained downtown, but it won’t take me a second to dress.”

As he passed under the electric light by the mirror, she saw his face with exaggerated distinctness, as if it were held under a microscope, and a heaviness, which she had never noticed before, marred the edge of his profile.  If he hadn’t been George, would she have said that he looked stupid at the moment?  For a flashing instant of illumination she saw him with a vision that was not her own, but a stranger’s, with a pitiless clearness unsoftened by any passion.  Then the clearness faded rapidly before an impulse of tenderness, and she told herself that he was merely handsome, gay, and careless, as he had been on their honeymoon.  If he would only talk to her, she felt that he would be perfect.

“Yes, I’m going.  Come as soon as you can,” she said; and catching up her satin train, she descended the oak staircase to the drawing-room, where a fire was burning and the lights were shaded in crimson.

Twenty minutes later, seated at the round table, which was bright with chrysanthemums in tall silver vases, she looked with a feeling of resentment at George’s empty place.  Why was he so careless?  Time had for him, she realized, as little meaning as words had.  Then, in the midst of her disquietude, she caught the serene blue eyes of George’s mother fixed upon her.  With her young face, her red lips, and her superb shoulders rising out of the rich black lace of her gown, Mrs. Fowler looked almost beautiful.  Had Patty not been present, with her loveliness like a summer’s day, her mother would have seemed hardly more than a girl; but who could shine while Patty, beside that long, lean man with the gray imperial, smiled with lips that were like a scarlet flower in her face?

There were only four guests, but these four, as Mrs. Fowler had said, “counted for something.”  The long, lean man beside Patty was one Colonel Buffington, a Virginia lawyer, who had wandered North in search of food in the barren years after the war.  As his mind was active in a patient accumulative fashion, he had become in time a musty storehouse of war anecdotes, and achieving but moderate success in his law practice,