“It was something red, wasn’t it?” he rejoined vaguely.

“It was scarlet tulle.”  Mary Byrd, as her mother had once observed, “hadn’t an indefinite bone in her body.”  Then she imparted an additional incident.  “She got it badly torn.  I saw her pinning it up in the dressing-room.”

“I should have been sorry for her,” said Margaret simply; and he felt that he had never in his life been so nearly in love with her.

“Is she pretty?” asked Mrs. Culpeper, appealing directly to Stephen as a man and an authority.  It was the question the strange woman had put to him in the Square, and ironical mirth seized the young man as he remembered.

“Do you think her pretty, Stephen?” repeated Margaret, and waited, with an expression of impartial interest, for his reply.

For an instant he hesitated.  Did he think Patty Vetch pretty or not?  “I hardly know,” he answered.  “I suppose it depends upon whether you like that kind of thing or not.  Why don’t you ask Peyton?” At the time he couldn’t have told himself whether he admired Patty or not.  She surprised him, she struck a new note, the note of the unexpected, but whether he liked or disliked it, he could not tell.  “There is something unusual about her,” he concluded hurriedly, feeling that he had not been quite fair.

“Well, I think she’s good looking enough,” Peyton, the incurious young man of “advanced” tastes, was replying.  “She seems to have a kind of fascination.  I don’t know what it is, but I dare say she inherited it from her father.  The Governor may be unsound in his views and uncertain in his methods, but I’ve yet to see any one who could resist his smile.”

“The Judge admires him,” remarked Stephen, with the air of a man who tosses a bomb into a legislative assembly.

“Oh, Stephen,” protested Victoria on a high note of interrogation, “how can he?”

“The Judge likes to keep up well with the times,” observed Mr. Culpeper, whose final argument against any innovation was the inquiry, “What do you suppose General Lee would have thought of it?” Pausing an instant while the family hung breathlessly on his words, he continued heroically:  “Now, it doesn’t bother me to be called an old fogy.”

“There’s no use trying to hide the fact that the Judge isn’t quite what he used to be,” said Mrs. Culpeper in an unusually tolerant tone.  “He has let his habit of joking grow on him until you never know whether he is serious or simply poking fun at you.”

“The next thing we hear,” suggested Peyton, who was quite dreadful at times, “will be that the old gentleman admires the daughter also.”

“He doesn’t like conspicuous women,” rejoined Victoria.  “He told me so only the other day when Mrs. Bradford announced that she was going to run for the legislature.”

“That’s the kind of conspicuousness we all object to,” commented Peyton; “Patty Vetch isn’t that sort.”

Janet was more merciful.  “Well, you are obliged to be conspicuous to-day if you want anybody to notice you,” she said.  “Look at Mary Byrd.”