“And he thinks he’ll get it by asking him to dinner?  There seems to me an obvious flaw in Berkeley’s reasoning.  I doubt if Vetch is the kind of man who follows when you hold out an apple.  He appears to be exactly the opposite, and I think he’s more likely to dash off than to come when he is called.  I wonder, by the way, if they are going to have Mrs. Stribling?”

“Rose Stribling?” A gleam of anger shone in Corinna’s eyes.  “Why should that interest you?”

“Oh, they say—­at least Mrs. Berkeley says, and if there is any misinformation abroad she ought to be aware of it—­that Mrs. Stribling’s latest attachment to her train is the Governor himself.”

He had expected his gossip to arouse Corinna, and in this he was not mistaken.  Springing up from her relaxed position, she sat straight and unbending, with her indignant eyes on his face.  “Why, I thought the war had cured her.”

“The war was not a cure; it was merely a temporary drug for our vanity,” he rejoined gaily.  “It didn’t cure me, so you could hardly regard it as a remedy for Mrs. Stribling’s complaint.  I imagine coquetry is a more obstinate malady even than priggishness, and, Heaven knows, I tried hard enough to get rid of that.”

“I hoped you would,” admitted Corinna.  “But, dear boy, the way to make you human—­and you’ve never been really human all through, you know—­was not with a uniform and glory.”  She was talking flippantly, for they made a pretence now of alluding lightly to his years in France—­he had gone into the war before his country—­and to the nervous malady, the disabled will, he had brought back.  “What you need is not to win more esteem, but to lose some that you’ve got.  Your salvation lies in the opposite direction from where flags are waving.  If you could only deliberately arrange to do something that would lower your reputation in the eyes of gouty old gentlemen or mothers with marriageable daughters!  If you could manage to get your nose broken, or elope with a chorus girl, or commit an unromantic murder, I should begin to have hopes of you.”

“I may do something as bad some day and surprise you.”

“It would surprise me.  But I’m not sure, after all, that I don’t like you better as you are, with your fine air of superiority.  It makes one believe, somehow, in human perfectibility.  Now, I can never believe in that when I realize how I feel about Rose Stribling.  There is nothing perfectible in such emotions.”

“Rose Stribling!  Beside you she is like a pumpkin in the basket with a pomegranate!”

Corinna laughed with frank pleasure.  “There are a million who would prefer the pumpkin to the pomegranate,” she answered.  “Rose Stribling, you must admit, is the type that has been the desire of the world since Venus first rose from the foam.”

“Can you imagine Mrs. Stribling rising from foam?” Stephen retorted impertinently.

“No, Venus has grown fatter through the ages,” assented Corinna, “but the type is unchanged.  Now, among all the compliments that have been paid me in my life, no one has ever compared me to the Goddess of Love.  I have been painted with the bow of Diana, but never with the doves of Venus.”