“I am ready now,” he said; and then as they went downstairs together, he added contritely:  “After this I’ll try to remember.”

“I hope you will, my dear.  It vexes your father.”  Even in his childhood Stephen had understood that his father’s “vexation” existed only as an instrument of correction in the hands of his mother.  Though he had discovered by the time he was three years old that the image was nothing more than a nursery bugaboo, there were occasions still when the figure was solemnly dressed up and paraded before his eyes.

“So it’s the Dad, bless him!” he exclaimed, for if he loved his mother in spite of her virtues, he joined heartily in the family worship of the head of the house.  “Well, he has had a word with Margaret anyway, and he ought to thank me for that.”

“Dear Margaret,” murmured Mrs. Culpeper, “she is looking so sweet to-night.”

That Margaret was looking very sweet indeed, Stephen acknowledged as soon as he entered the room, where the firelight suffused the Persian rugs (which had replaced the earlier Brussels carpet woven in a mammoth floral design), the elaborately carved and twisted rosewood chairs and sofas, upholstered in ruby-coloured brocade, the few fine old pieces of Chippendale or Heppelwhite, the massive crystal chandelier, and the precise copies of Italian paintings in gorgeous Florentine frames.  Here and there hung a family portrait, one of Amanda Culpeper, a famous English beauty, with a long nose and a short upper lip, not unlike Victoria’s.  This painting, which was supposed to be by Sir Joshua Reynolds, was a source of unfailing consolation to Victoria, though Stephen preferred the Sully painting of his grandmother, Judith Randolph, who reminded him in some subtle way of Margaret Blair.  In his childhood he had believed this drawing-room to be the most beautiful place on earth, and he never entered it now without a feeling of regret for a shattered illusion.

As he took Margaret’s hand her expression of intelligent sympathy went straight to his heart; and he told himself emphatically that after all the familiar graces in women were the most lovable.  She was a small fragile girl, with a lovely oval face, nut-brown hair that grew in a “widow’s peak” on her forehead, and the prettiest dark blue eyes in the world.  Her figure drooped slightly in the shoulders, and was, as Mary Byrd pointed out in her dashing way, “without the faintest pretence to style.”  But if Margaret lacked “style,” she possessed an unconscious grace which seemed to Stephen far more attractive.  It was delightful to watch the flowing lines of her clothes, as if, he used to imagine in a fanciful strain, she were poured out of some slender porcelain vase.  Her dress to-night, of delicate blue crepe, began slightly below the throat and reached almost to her ankles.  It was a fashion which he had always admired; but he realized that it gave Margaret, who was only twenty-two, a quaint air of maturity.