She responded with a disdainful movement of her shoulders which might have been a shrug if she had had French instead of Irish blood in her veins.  In her evening cloak of green velvet trimmed with gray fox she had the look of a small wild creature of the forest.  Beneath her thick eyelashes her eyes shone through a greenish mist; and at the moment there was something frightened and furtive in their brightness.

“Of course,” she replied defiantly, moving away from him in the direction of the staircase.  “I had a wonderful time—­perfectly wonderful.  The people were all so interesting.”  Her pronunciation was as deliberately correct as if she were reading from a dictionary.  It was the air of superiority that she always assumed with Gershom, for in no other way, she had learned from experience, could she irritate him so intensely.

His jovial manner gave place to a crestfallen look.  “Who was there?  I reckon I know the names anyway.”

He affected a true republican scorn of appearances; and standing there, in his dishevelled business clothes beside Patty’s ethereal youth, he looked as hopelessly battered by reality as a political theory, or as old General Powhatan Plummer of aristocratic descent.

Patty had often wondered what it was about the man that aroused in her so unconquerable an aversion.  He was not ugly compared to many of the men her father had brought to the house; and ten years ago, when she first met him in the little country town where they were living, his curling black hair and sharp black eyes had seemed to her rather attractive than otherwise.  If he had been merely untidy and unashamed in dress, she might have tolerated the failing as the outward sign of a distinguished social philosophy; but, even in those early days, his Jeffersonian simplicity had yielded to an outbreak of vanity.  Though his clothes were unbrushed and his boots were unpolished, he wore a sparkling pin in his tie and several sparkling rings on his fingers.  There was something else, too, some easy tone of patronage, some familiar inflexion, which as a child she had hated.  Now, after the evening with Stephen Culpeper, she shrank from him with a disgust which was made all the keener by contrast.  A pitiless light had fallen over Gershom while he stood there beside her, as if his bad taste and his pathetic ambition to appear something that he was not, had become exaggerated into positive vices.  She was too young to perceive the essential pathos of all wasted effort, of all misdirected attempts to overcome the disadvantages of ignorance; and while she looked at him now, she saw only the vulgarity.  Like all those who have suffered from insufficient opportunities and wounded pride, Patty Vetch was without mercy for the very weaknesses that she had risen above.  After the evening at the Berkeleys’ she felt that she should be less ashamed of a drunkard than of a man who wore diamonds because he thought that it was the correct thing to do.  She remembered