The Berkeleys were what was still known in their small social world as “quiet people.”  They entertained little, and always with a definite object which they were not afraid to disclose.  Their house, an incongruous example of Mid-Victorian architecture, was still suffused for them with the sentimental glamour of their wedding day.  The walls, untouched for years, were covered with embossed paper and panelled in yellow oak.  The furniture, protected for five months of the year by covers of striped linen, was stiffly upholstered in pea-green brocade; and the pictures, hanging very high, were large but inferior oil paintings in heavily gilded frames that represented preposterous sheaves of wheat or garlands of roses.  Forty years ago the house reproduced within and without “the best taste” of the period, and was as bad as the Berkeleys could afford to make it.  Since then fashions had come and gone; yet the hospitable home remained as unchanged as the politics of the host or the figure of the hostess.  The Berkeleys were still content to be “old-fashioned people,” with the fine feeling and the indiscriminate taste of an era which had flowered not in architecture but in character, when the standard of living was high and the style in furniture correspondingly low.  To-night the ten guests (the Berkeleys never gave large dinners) had been carefully chosen, and the evening would probably be distinguished by good talk and good wine.  Though they were law-abiding persons to the core, the bitterness of the Eighteenth Amendment had not penetrated to the subterranean darkness where Mr. Berkeley’s treasures were stored.

Mrs. Berkeley, a brisk, compact little woman, with a pretty florid face and the prominent bosom and tapering waist of forty years ago, turned from the Governor as Corinna and the Judge entered, and hurried forward in her animated way, which reminded one of the manner of a child that is trying to make a success of a dolls’ party.  Beyond Mr. Berkeley, a short, neutral-tinted man without emphasis of personality, Corinna saw Mrs. Stribling’s tall, full figure draped in a gown of jade-coloured velvet, with a daringly short skirt from which a narrow, sharply pointed train wound like a serpent.  Her heavy hair, of an unusual shade of pale gold, had the smooth, polished look of metal which had been moulded in waves close to her head.  In spite of her active life and her disastrous affairs, she presented an unblemished complexion, as if her hard rosy surface were protected by some indestructible glaze.  Beside her opulent attractions the frail prettiness of Alice Rokeby, who was dining out for the first time this winter, looked wistful and pathetic.  Every one, except Corinna, who had been abroad at the time, knew of the old affair between Alice Rokeby and John Benham; and every one who knew of it had thought that they would be married as soon as she got her divorce.  But time had dragged on; Corinna had come home again; and Alice Rokeby’s violet