eyes had grown deeper and more wistful, with a haunted look in them as if they were denying a hungry heart.  She had never dressed well; she had never, as Mrs. Stribling remarked, known how to bring out her best points; and to-night she had been even less successful than usual.  Both Corinna and Mrs. Stribling could have told her that she should have avoided violent shades; and yet she was wearing now a dress of vivid purple which made her pale rose-leaf complexion look almost sallow.  Though she could exercise when she chose a strangely passive attraction, her charm usually failed in the end for lack of intelligent guidance.

A little beyond Alice Rokeby, where her eyes could follow his gestures, John Benham was talking in his pleasant subdued voice to Patty Vetch, who looked, in her frock of scarlet tulle, as if she had just alighted from the chorus of a musical comedy.  Her boyish dark head was bent over a fan of scarlet feathers, a toy which appeared ridiculously large beside her small figure.  It was evident that the girl was trying to cover an uncomfortable shyness with an air of mocking effrontery; and a moment later, when Corinna joined them, Benham glanced up with a flash of satirical amusement in his eyes.  He was a tall thin man of middle age, with a striking appearance and the straight composed features of an early American portrait.  His dark hair, brushed back from his forehead, had the shining gloss that comes of good living and careful grooming, and this gloss was reflected in his smiling gray eyes and in the healthy red of his well-cut though not quite generous mouth.  He was a charming guest, an impressive speaker, a sympathetic listener; yet there had always seemed to Corinna to be a subtle deficiency in his character.  It was only of late, since their friendship had turned into a warmer feeling, that she had been able to overcome that sense of something wanting which had troubled her when she was with him.  She could define no quality that was absent; but the impression he still gave her at times was one of a man tremendously gifted and yet curiously inadequate.  A mental thinness perhaps?  An emotional dryness?  Or was it merely that here also she felt, rather than perceived, the intrinsic weakness of the old order?

Beyond Benham, Gideon Vetch, rugged, sanguine, and wearing the wrong tie with his evening clothes as valiantly as he had worn the rumpled brown suit in which Stephen had last seen him, was talking in a loud voice to Miss Maria Berkeley—­one of those serene single women arrayed in dove-colour who belong as appropriately as crewel work or antimacassars to another century.  If Patty was shy and self-conscious, it was evident that her state of mind was not shared by her father.  He was interested because he was expressing a cherished opinion, and he was talking in an emphatic tone because he hoped that he might be overheard.  When Mrs. Berkeley drew him away in order to introduce him to Corinna, he resumed his theme immediately, as if he were addressing a public meeting and had scarcely noticed that there had been a change in his audience.  “Miss Berkeley was asking me what I thought of the effects of prohibition,” he explained presently with his smile of unguarded friendliness.  How was it possible to arrest the attention of a man who insisted on talking of prohibition?