“Only from the Culpeper one,” protested Corinna.  “I find her very attractive.”

“Well, I do not.”  Mrs. Culpeper had relapsed into her tone of habitual martyrdom.  “If Stephen chooses to kill me,” she added, “he may do it.”

Corinna leaned toward her ingratiatingly.  “Don’t you admit, Cousin Harriet, that I have improved Patty tremendously?”

“I see no difference.”

“Oh, but there is one—­a great difference!  If you had come to one of the Governor’s receptions last winter, you couldn’t have told that she wasn’t—­well, one of us.  She has been so quick to pick up things that it is amazing.”

Mrs. Culpeper lifted the transparent mesh from the point of her nose.  “Do you know,” she demanded, “that the girl was born in a circus tent?”

“So I have heard.  It was a romantic beginning.”

Foiled but undaunted, the older woman fixed on Corinna the stare with which she would have attempted the conversion of an undraped pagan if she had ever encountered one.  Though she was unconscious of the fact as she sat there, suffering yet unbending, in the Florentine chair, she represented the logical result of the conservative principle in nature, of the spirit that forgets nothing and learns nothing, of the instinct of the type to reproduce itself, without variation or development, until the pattern is worn too thin to endure.  That Stephen had inherited this passive force, Corinna knew, but she knew also, that it was threatened by his incurable romanticism, by that inarticulate longing for heroic adventures.

Suddenly, as if moved by a steel spring, Mrs. Culpeper rose.  “I know you have a great deal of influence over Stephen,” she said, “and I hoped that, instead of encouraging him in his folly, you would sympathize with me.”

“I do sympathize with you, Cousin Harriet—­only I have learned that it is sometimes very difficult to decide what is folly and what is wisdom in a man’s life.”

“There can scarcely be a doubt, I think, about this.  Surely you cannot imagine that there would be happiness for my son in a marriage with the daughter of Gideon Vetch?”

There was a dreamy sweetness in Corinna’s eyes.  “I can’t answer that, Cousin Harriet, because I don’t know.  But are you sure it has gone as far as that?  Has Stephen really thought of marriage?”

“I don’t know.  He tells me nothing,” replied Mrs. Culpeper hopelessly, and she added after a pause:  “But I can’t help having eyes.  It is either that—­or he is going into politics.”  Her tone was as despairing as if she had said, “he is coming down with fever.”

For a minute Corinna hesitated; then she responded cheerfully, “If it is any comfort to you, Cousin Harriet, I feel that you are making a mountain out of a mole hill.  When it comes to the point, I believe that Stephen will revert to type like the rest of us.”

Mrs. Culpeper clutched desperately at the straw that was offered her.  “You think he won’t ask her to marry him?”