consternation when the frock had been unpacked from its Paris wrappings had been temporarily mitigated by the assertion that unless one danced in gowns like that, one simply couldn’t be expected to dance at all.  “Of course, if you wish me to be a wall-flower like Margaret Blair,” Mary Byrd had protested with wounded dignity; and since Mrs. Culpeper wished nothing on earth so little as that, her only response had been, “Well, I hope to heaven that you won’t let your father see it!”

Now, as her husband was heard descending the stairs, she said hurriedly:  “Mary Byrd, if you won’t put a scarf over your knees, I wish you would wear one around your neck.”

“Oh, Father won’t mind,” retorted Mary Byrd flippantly.  “He is a real sport, and he knows that you have to play the game well if you play it at all.”  Then turning with her liveliest air, she remarked as Mr. Culpeper entered:  “Father, darling, I’ve just said that you were a sport.”

Mr. Culpeper surveyed her with portentous disapproval.  He adored her, and she knew it, but because it was impossible for his features to wear any expression lightly, the natural gravity of his look deepened to a thundercloud.

“Is Mary Byrd going in swimming?” he demanded not of his daughter, but of the family.

“No, you precious, only in dancing,” replied Mary Byrd, as she rose airily and placed a kiss above the thundercloud on his forehead.

“Will you go looking like this?”

“Not if I can possibly look any worse.”  She swayed like a golden lily before his astonished gaze.  “Can you suggest any way that I might?”

“I cannot.”  His face cleared under the kiss, and he held her at arm’s length while paternal pride softened his look.  “Do you really mean that you won’t shock the young men away from you?” It was as near a jest as he had ever come, and a ripple of amusement passed over the room.

“I may shock them, but not away.”  The girl was really a wonder.  How in the world, he asked himself, did she happen to be his daughter?

“Do you mean that all the other girls dress like this?” It was his final appeal to an arbitrary but acknowledged authority.

“All the popular ones.  You can’t wish me to dress like the unpopular ones, can you?”

His appeal had failed, and he accepted defeat with the sober courage his father had displayed in a greater surrender.

“Well, I suppose if everybody does it, it is all right,” he conceded; and though he was not aware of it, he had compressed into this convenient axiom his whole philosophy of conduct.

As he crossed the room to the glowing fire and the black marble mantelpiece, which had supplanted the delicate Adam one of a less resplendent period, he wore an air that was at once gentle and haughty—­the expression of a man who hopes that he is a Christian and knows that his blood is blue.

“Hasn’t Stephen come in yet?” he inquired of his wife.  “I thought I heard him upstairs.”