At the table a little later Corinna asked herself the question again, while she made light conversation for the retired general who had taken her in—­an anecdotal, bewhiskered presence, with the husky voice and the glazed eyes of successful pomposity.  Glancing occasionally at Vetch who sat on her left, she found that he was describing to Mrs. Berkeley the best protection against forest fires.  As far as Corinna was concerned, she felt that she might as well have been a view from the window, or the portrait of Mr. Berkeley’s great aunt that hung over the mantelpiece.  He had probably, she reflected, classified her lightly as “another gray-haired woman,” and passed on to Rose Stribling, who bloomed triumphantly between John Benham and Stephen Culpeper.  Vetch was so different from what Corinna had expected to find him that, in some vague way, she felt disappointed and absurdly resentful.  Had her imagination, she wondered, prepared her to meet one of the picturesque radicals of fiction?  Had she looked for a middle-aged Felix Holt; and was this why the Governor’s prosaic figure, his fresh-coloured, undistinguished face and his vehement, spectacular gestures, dispelled immediately the interest she had felt in the meeting?  There were no salient points in his appearance, nothing that she could detach from the rest in her mental image of him.  There was no single characteristic of which she could say:  “He may be common; he may be vulgar; but he strikes the note of greatness here—­and here—­and here.”  With such a man, she felt, the direct and obvious appeal of Rose Stribling would be victorious.  He could discern pink and white and blue and gold; but the indeterminate shades, the subtleties and mysteries of charm were enigmatical to him.  His emotions would be as literal as his convictions or his oratory.  Yet there must be some faculty in him which did not appear on the surface, some primitive grasp of realities in his understanding of men.  Why should the influence of this sanguine, loud-talking demagogue, she asked herself the next minute, be greater than the influence of John Benham, who possessed every admirable trait except the ability to make people follow him?  What was this fundamental difference in material or structure which divided them so completely?  When she had traced it to its source would she discover the secret of Vetch’s conquering personality?

Looking away from the General, her eyes rested for a moment on Stephen Culpeper, who was listening with his reserved impersonal attention to the amusing prattle of Patty Vetch.  Obeying an imperative rule, Mrs. Berkeley had placed her youngest guests together; and yet, if Stephen had been seventy-five instead of twenty-six, he could sparcely have had less in common with the Governor’s daughter.  With her small glossy head, and her scarlet cheeks and lips above the fan of ostrich feathers, the girl reminded Corinna of a spray of Christmas holly, all dark and bright and shining.  Ever since Patty’s first visit