except prosperity—­though as Corinna had once observed, with characteristic flippancy, “Continual affliction was a high price to pay for Aunt Harriet’s favour.”  In her girlhood she had been a famous beauty; and she was still as fine and delicately tinted as a carving in old ivory, with a skin like a faded microphylla rose-leaf, and stiff yellowish white hair, worn a la Pompadour.  Her mind was thin but firm, and having received a backward twist in its youth, it had remained inflexibly bent for more than sixty years.  Unlike her husband she was gifted with an active, though perfectly concrete imagination—­a kind of superior magic lantern that shot out images in black and white on a sheet—­and a sense of humour which, in spite of the fact that it lost its edge when it was pointed at the family, was not without practical value in a crisis.

On the evening of Stephen’s adventure in the Square, the Culpeper family had gathered in the front drawing-room, to await the arrival of a young cousin, whom, they devoutly hoped, Stephen would one day perceive the wisdom of marrying.  The four daughters—­Victoria, the eldest, who had nursed in France during the war; Hatty, who ought to have been pretty, and was not; Janet, who was candidly plain; and Mary Byrd, who would have been a beauty in any circle—­were talking eagerly, with the innumerable little gestures which they had inherited from Mrs. Culpeper’s side of the house.  They adored one another; they adored their father and mother; they adored their three brothers and their married sister, whose name was Julia; and they adored every nephew and niece in the connection.  Though they often quarrelled, being young and human, these quarrels rippled as lightly as summer storms over profound depths of devotion.

“Oh, I do wish,” said Mary Byrd, who had “come out” triumphantly the winter before, “that Stephen would marry Margaret.”  She was a slender graceful girl, with red-gold hair, which had a lustrous sheen and a natural wave in it, and the brown ox-like eyes of her father.  There was a great deal of what Peyton, the second son, who lived at home, and was the most modern of the family, called “dash” about her.

“It was the war that spoiled it,” said Janet, the plain one, who possessed what her mother fondly described as “a charm that was all her own.”  “I sometimes think the war spoiled everything.”

At this Victoria, the eldest, demurred mildly.  Ever since she had nursed in France, she had assumed a slightly possessive manner toward the war, as if she had in some mysterious way brought it into the world and was responsible for its reputation.  She was tall and very thin, with a perfect complexion, a long nose, and a short upper lip which showed her teeth too much when she laughed.  Her hair was fair and fluffy; and Mrs. Culpeper, who could not praise her beauty, was very proud of her “aristocratic appearance.”

“Why, he never even mentions the war,” she protested.