And yet, so inexplicable are the laws of the mind, this escape from the tyranny of convention, from the irksome round of practical details, recoiled perversely into an increased joy of living.  Because he could escape at will from the routine, he no longer dreaded to return to it.  The light which irradiated the image of Patty transfigured the events and circumstances amid which he moved.  It shed its glory over external incidents as well as into the loneliest vacancy, the deserted places, of his being.  Everything around and within him, the very youth in his soul, became more intense in the hours when he allowed this emotion to assume control of his thoughts.  Just to be alive, that was enough!  Just to be free again from the sensation of stifling in trivial things, of suffocating in the monotony which rushed over one like a torrent of ashes.  Just to escape with Patty into that wild kingdom of the mind where the sun never set!

When he returned home that evening, his mother met him as he entered the hall, and followed him upstairs.

“It is a beautiful evening for the dance, dear.  They are having the garden illuminated.”

Though he smiled back at her, his smile had that dreamy remoteness, that look of meaning more than it revealed, which was bewildering to an acute and practical intelligence.  From long and intimate association with her husband, Mrs. Culpeper was accustomed to dealing with ponderous barriers to knowledge; but this plastic and variable substance of Stephen’s resistance, gave her an uncomfortable feeling of helplessness.  Even when her son acquiesced, as he did usually in her demands, she suspected that his acquiescence was merely on the surface, that in the depths of his mind he was, as she said to herself resentfully, “holding something back.”

“Margaret is looking so sweet,” she began in her smoothest tone.  “Of course she isn’t the beauty that Mary Byrd is, but, in her quiet way, she is very handsome.”

“No, she isn’t the beauty that Mary Byrd is,” conceded Stephen, so pleasantly that she realized he was repeating parrot-like the phrase she had uttered.  His thoughts were somewhere else, she observed bitterly; it was perfectly evident that he was not paying the slightest attention to anything that she said.

“You must use your father’s car,” she remarked, as amiably as before.  “It is better to have a chauffeur, and Mary Byrd is going with Willy Tarleton.”

“And the other girls?” he asked, for her words appeared at last to have penetrated the haze that enveloped his mind.

“Harriet is spending the night with Lily Whittle, and she will go from there.  Of course Victoria has given up dancing since she came home from France, and poor Janet stopped going to parties the year she came out.”

This pitiless maternal classification of Janet aroused his amusement.  “Well, I’d be glad to take Janet anywhere, even if her nose is a little longer than Mary Byrd’s,” he retorted.  “She’s the jolliest of the lot, and she seems to me very well contented as she is.”