CHAPTER I

E-text prepared by David Garcia, Mary Meehan, and the Project Gutenberg

Online Distributed Proofreading Team

ONE MAN IN HIS TIME

by

ELLEN GLASGOW

1922

"One man in his time plays many parts."

NOTE

No character in this book was drawn from any actual person past or

present.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

I. THE SHADOW

II. GIDEON VETCH

III. CORINNA OF THE OLD PRINT SHOP

IV. THE TRIBAL INSTINCT

V. MARGARET

VI. MAGIC

VII. CORINNA GOES TO WAR

VIII. THE WORLD AND PATTY

IX. SEPTEMBER ROSES

X. PATTY AND CORINNA

XI. THE OLD WALLS AND THE RISING TIDE

XII. A JOURNEY INTO MEAN STREETS

XIII. CORINNA WONDERS

XIV. A LITTLE LIGHT ON HUMAN NATURE

XV. CORINNA OBSERVES

XVI. THE FEAR OF LIFE

XVII. MRS. GREEN

XVIII. MYSTIFICATION

XIX. THE SIXTH SENSE

XX. CORINNA FACES LIFE

XXI. DANCE MUSIC

XXII. THE NIGHT

XXIII. THE DAWN

XXIV. THE VICTORY OF GIDEON VETCH

CHAPTER I

THE SHADOW

The winter's twilight, as thick as blown smoke, was drifting through the

Capitol Square. Already the snow covered walks and the frozen fountains

were in shadow; but beyond the irregular black boughs of the trees the

sky was still suffused with the burning light of the sunset. Over the

head of the great bronze Washington a single last gleam of sunshine shot

suddenly before it vanished amid the spires and chimneys of the city,

which looked as visionary and insubstantial as the glowing horizon.

Stopping midway of the road, Stephen Culpeper glanced back over the

vague streets and the clearer distance, where the approaching dusk spun

mauve and silver cobwebs of air. From that city, it seemed to him, a new

and inscrutable force--the force of an idea--had risen within the last

few months to engulf the Square and all that the Square had ever meant

in his life. Though he was only twenty-six, he felt that he had watched

the decay and dissolution of a hundred years. Nothing of the past

remained untouched. Not the old buildings, not the old trees, not even

the old memories. Clustering traditions had fled in the white blaze of

electricity; the quaint brick walks, with their rich colour in the

sunlight, were beginning to disappear beneath the expressionless mask of

concrete. It was all changed since his father's or his grandfather's

day; it was all obvious and cheap, he thought; it was all ugly and naked

and undistinguished--yet the tide of the new ideas was still rising.

Democracy, relentless, disorderly, and strewn with the wreckage of finer

things, had overwhelmed the world of established customs in which he

lived.

As he lifted his face to the sky, his grave young features revealed a

subtle kinship to the statues beneath the mounted Washington in the

drive, as if both flesh and bronze had been moulded by the dominant

spirit of race. Like the heroes of the Revolution, he appeared a

stranger in an age which had degraded manners and enthroned commerce;

and like them also he seemed to survey the present from some

inaccessible height of the past. Dignity he had in abundance, and a

certain mellow, old-fashioned quality; yet, in spite of his

well-favoured youth, he was singularly lacking in sympathetic appeal.

Already people were beginning to say that they "admired Culpeper; but he

was a bit of a prig, and they couldn't get really in touch with him."

His attitude of mind, which was passive but critical, had developed the

faculties of observation rather than the habits of action. As a member

of the community he was indifferent and amiable, gay and ironic. Only

the few who had seen his reserve break down before the rush of an

uncontrollable impulse suspected that there were rich veins of feeling

buried beneath his conventional surface, and that he cherished an

inarticulate longing for heroic and splendid deeds. The war had left

him with a nervous malady which he had never entirely overcome; and this

increased both his romantic dissatisfaction with his life and his

inability to make a sustained effort to change it.

The sky had faded swiftly to pale orange; the distant buildings appeared

to swim toward him in the silver air; and the naked trees barred the

white slopes with violet shadows. In the topmost branches of an old

sycamore the thinnest fragment of a new moon hung trembling like a

luminous thread. The twilight was intensely still, and the noises of the

city fell with a metallic sound on his ears, as if a multitude of bells

were ringing about him. While he walked on past the bald outline of the

restored and enlarged Capitol, this imaginary concert grew gradually

fainter, until he heard above it presently the sudden closing of a

window in the Governor's mansion--as the old gray house was called.

Pausing abruptly, the young man frowned as his eyes fell on the charming

Georgian front, which presided like a serene and spacious memory over

the modern utilitarian purpose that was devastating the Square. Alone in

its separate plot, broad, low, and hospitable, the house stood there

divided and withdrawn from the restless progress and the age of

concrete--a modest reminder of the centuries when men had built well

because they had time, before they built, to stop and think and

remember. The arrested dignity of the past seemed to the young man to

hover above the old mansion within its setting of box hedges and

leafless lilac shrubs and snow-laden magnolia trees. He saw the house

contrasted against the crude surroundings of the improved and disfigured

Square, and against the house, attended by all its stately traditions,

he saw the threatening figure of Gideon Vetch. "So it has come to this,"

he thought resentfully, with his gaze on the doorway where a round

yellow globe was shining. Ragged frost-coated branches framed the

sloping roof, and the white columns of the square side porches emerged

from the black crags of magnolia trees. In the centre of the circular

drive, invaded by concrete, a white heron poured a stream of melting ice

from a distorted throat.

The shutters were not closed at the lower windows, and the firelight

flickered between the short curtains of some brownish muslin. As Stephen

passed the gate on his way down the hill, a figure crossed one of the

windows, and his frown deepened as he recognized, or imagined that he

recognized, the shadow of Gideon Vetch.

"Gideon Vetch!" At the sound of the name the young man threw back his

head and laughed softly. A Gideon Vetch was Governor of Virginia! Here

also, he told himself, half humorously, half bitterly, democracy had

won. Here also the destroying idea had triumphed. In sight of the bronze

Washington, this Gideon Vetch, one of "the poor white trash," born in a

circus tent, so people said, the demagogue of demagogues in Stephen's

opinion--this Gideon Vetch had become Governor of Virginia! Yet the

placid course of Stephen's life flowed on precisely as it had flowed

ever since he could remember, and the dramatic hand of Washington had

not fallen. It was still so recent; it had come about so unexpectedly,

that people--at least the people the young man knew and esteemed--were

still trying to explain how it had happened. The old party had been

sleeping, of course; it had grown too confident, some said too

corpulent; and it had slept on peacefully, in spite of the stirring

strength of the labour leaders, in spite of the threatening coalition of

the new factions, in spite even of the swift revolt against the stubborn

forces of habit, of tradition, of overweening authority. His mother, he

knew, held the world war responsible; but then his mother was so

constituted that she was obliged to blame somebody or something for

whatever happened. Yet others, he admitted, as well as his mother, held

the war responsible for Gideon Vetch--as if the great struggle had cast

him out in some gigantic cataclysm, as if it had broken through the once

solid ground of established order, and had released into the world all

the explosive gases of disintegration, of destruction.

For himself, the young man reflected now, he had always thought

otherwise. It was a period, he felt, of humbug radicalism, of windbag

eloquence; yet he possessed both wit and discernment enough to see that,

though ideas might explode in empty talk, still it took ideas to make

the sort of explosion that was deafening one's ears. All the flat

formula of the centuries could not produce a single Gideon Vetch. Such

men were part of the changing world; they answered not to reasoned

argument, but to the loud crash of breaking idols. Stephen hated Vetch

with all his heart, but he acknowledged him. He did not try to evade the

man's tremendous veracity, his integrity of being, his inevitableness.

An inherent intellectual honesty compelled Stephen to admit that, "the

demagogue", as he called him, had his appropriate place in the age that

produced him--that he existed rather as an outlet for political

tendencies than as the product of international violence. He was more

than a theatrical attitude--a torrent of words. Even a free country--and

Stephen thought sentimentally of America as "a free country"--must have

its tyrannies of opinion, and consequently its rebels against current

convictions. In the older countries he had imagined that it might be

possible to hold with the hare and run with the hounds; but in the land

of opportunity for all there was less reason to be astonished when the

hunted turned at last into the hunter. Where every boy was taught that

he might some day be President, why should one stand amazed when the

ambitious son of a circus rider became Governor of Virginia? After all,

a fair field and no favours was the best that the most conservative of

politicians--the best that even John Benham could ask.

Yes, there was a cause, there was a reason for the miracle of disorder,

or it would not have happened. The hour had called forth the man; but

the man had been there awaiting the strokes, listening, listening, with

his ear to the wind. It had been a triumph of personality, one of those

rare dramatic occasions when the right man and the appointed time come

together. This the young man admitted candidly in the very moment when

he told himself that he detested the demagogue and all his works. A man

who consistently made his bid for the support of the radical element!

Who stirred up the forces of discontent because he could harness them

to his chariot! A man who was born in a circus tent, and who still

performed in public the tricks of a mountebank! That this man had power,

Stephen granted ungrudgingly; but it was power over the undisciplined,

the half-educated, the mentally untrained. It was power, as John Benham

had once remarked with a touch of hyperbole, over empty stomachs.

There were persons in Stephen's intimate circle (there are such persons

even in the most conservative communities) who contended that Vetch was

in his way a rude genius. Judge Horatio Lancaster Page, for instance,

insisted that the Governor had a charm of his own, that, "he wasn't half

bad to look at if you caught him smiling," that he could even reason

"like one of us," if you granted him his premise. After the open debate

between Vetch and Benham--the great John Benham, hero of war and peace,

and tireless labourer in the vineyard of public service--after this

memorable discussion, Judge Horatio Lancaster Page had remarked, in his

mild, unpolemical tone, that "though John had undoubtedly carried off

the flowers of rhetoric, there was a good deal of wholesome green stuff

about that fellow Vetch." But everybody knew that a man with a comical

habit of mind could not be right.

Again the figure crossed the firelight between the muslin curtains, and

to Stephen Culpeper, standing alone in the snow outside, that large

impending presence embodied all that he and his kind had hated and

feared for generations. It embodied among other disturbances the law of

change; and to Stephen and his race of pleasant livers the two sinister

forces in the universe were change and death. After all, they had made

the world, these pleasant livers; and what were those other people--the

people represented by that ominous shadow--except the ragged prophets of

disorder and destruction?

Turning away, Stephen descended the wide brick walk which fell

gradually, past the steps of the library and the gaunt railing round a

motionless fountain, to the broad white slope of the Square with its

smoky veil of twilight. Farther away he saw the high iron fence and

heard the clanging of passing street cars. On his left the ugly shape

of the library resembled some crude architectural design sketched on

parchment.

As he approached the fountain, a small figure in a red cape detached

itself suddenly from the mesh of shadows, and he recognized Patty Vetch,

the irrepressible young daughter of the Governor. He had seen her the

evening before at a charity ball, where she had been politely snubbed by

what he thought of complacently as "our set." From the moment when he

had first looked at her across the whirling tulle and satin skirts in

the ballroom, he had decided that she embodied as obviously as her

father, though in a different fashion, the qualities which were most

offensive both to his personal preferences and his inherited standards

of taste. The girl in her scarlet dress, with her dark bobbed hair

curling in on her neck, her candid ivory forehead, her provoking blunt

nose, her bright red lips, and the inquiring arch of her black eyebrows

over her gray-green eyes, had appeared to him absurdly like a picture on

the cover of some cheap magazine. He had heartily disapproved of her,

but he couldn't help looking at her. If she had been on the cover of a

magazine, he had told himself sternly, he should never have bought it.

He had correct ideas of what a lady should be (they were inherited from

the early eighties and his mother had implanted them), and he would

have known anywhere that Patty Vetch was not exactly a lady. Though he

was broad enough in his views to realize that types repeat themselves

only in variations, and that girls of to-day are not all that they were

in the happy eighties--that one might make up flashily like Geraldine

St. John, or dance outrageously like Bertha Underwood, and yet remain

in all essential social values "a lady"--still he was aware that the

external decorations of a chorus girl could not turn the shining

daughter of the St. Johns for an imitation of paste, and, though the

nimble Bertha could perform every Jazz motion ever invented, one would

never dream of associating her with a circus ring. It was not the things

one did that made one appear unrefined, he had concluded at last, but

the way that one did them; and Patty Vetch's way was not the prescribed

way of his world. Small as she was there was too much of her. She

contrived always to be where one was looking. She was too loud, too

vivid, too highly charged with vitality; she was too obviously

different. If a redbird had flown into the heated glare of the ballroom

Stephen's gaze would have followed it with the same startled and

fascinated attention.

As the girl approached him now on the snow-covered slope, he was

conscious again of that swift recoil from chill disapproval to reluctant

attraction. Though she was not beautiful, though she was not even pretty

according to the standards with which he was familiar, she possessed

what he felt to be a dangerous allurement. He had never imagined that

anything so small could be so much alive. The electric light under which

she passed revealed the few golden freckles over her childish nose, the

gray-green colour of her eyes beneath the black eyelashes, and the

sensitive red mouth which looked as soft and sweet as a carnation. It

revealed also the absurd shoes of gray suede, with French toes and high

and narrow heels, in which she flitted, regardless alike of danger and

of common sense, over the slippery ground. The son of a strong-minded

though purely feminine mother, he had been trained to esteem discretion

in dress almost as highly as rectitude of character in a woman; and by

no charitable stretch of the imagination could he endow his first

impression of Patty Vetch with either of these attributes.

"It would serve her right if she fell and broke her leg," he thought

severely; and the idea of such merited punishment was still in his mind

when he heard a sharp gasp of surprise, and saw the girl slip, with a

frantic clutch at the air, and fall at full length on the shining

ground. When he sprang forward and bent over her, she rose quickly to

her knees and held out what he thought at first was some queer small

muff of feathers.

"Please hold this pigeon," she said, "I saw it this afternoon, and I

came out to look for it. Somebody has broken its wings."

"If you came out to walk on ice," he replied with a smile, "why, in

Heaven's name, didn't you wear skates or rubbers?"

She gave a short little laugh which was entirely without merriment. "I

don't skate, and I never wear rubbers."

He glanced down at her feet in candid disapproval. "Then you mustn't be

surprised if you get a sprained ankle."

"I am not surprised," she retorted calmly. "Nothing surprises me. Only

my ankle isn't sprained. I am just getting my breath."

She had rested her knee on a bench, and she looked up at him now with

bright, enigmatical eyes. "You don't mind waiting a moment, do you?"

she asked. To his secret resentment she appeared to be deliberately

appraising either his abilities or his attractions--he wasn't sure which

engaged her bold and perfectly unembarrassed regard.

"No, I don't mind in the least," he replied, "but I'd like to get you

home if you have really hurt yourself. Of course it was your own fault

that you fell," he added truthfully but indiscreetly.

For an instant she seemed to be holding her breath, while he stood there

in what he felt to be a foolish attitude, with the pigeon (for all

symbolical purposes it might as well have been a dove) clasped to his

breast.

"Oh, I know," she responded presently in a voice which was full of

suppressed anger. "Everything is my fault--even the fact that I was

born!"

Shocked out of his conventional manner, he stared at her in silence, and

the pigeon, feeling the strain of his grasp, fluttered softly against

his overcoat. What was there indeed for him to do except stare at a lack

of reticence, of good-breeding, which he felt to be deplorable? His fine

young face, with its characteristic note of reserve, hardened into

sternness as he remembered having heard somewhere that the girl's mother

had been killed or injured when she was performing some dangerous act at

a country fair. Well, one might expect anything, he supposed, from such

an inheritance.

"May I help you?" he asked with distant and chilly politeness.

"Oh, can't you wait a minute?" She impatiently thrust aside his offer.

"I _must_ get my breath again."

It was plain that she was very angry, that she was in the clutch of a

smothered yet violent resentment, which, he inferred with reason, was

directed less against himself than against some abstract and impersonal

law of life. Her rage was not merely temper against a single human

being; it was, he realized, a passionate rebellion against Fate or

Nature, or whatever she personified as the instrument of the injustice

from which she suffered. Her eyes were gleaming through the web of light

and shadow; her mouth was trembling; and there was the moisture of

tears--or was it only the glitter of ice?--on her round young cheek. And

while he looked, chilled, disapproving, unsympathetic, at the vivid

flower-like bloom of her face, there seemed to flow from her and envelop

him the spirit of youth itself--of youth adventurous, intrepid, and

defiant; of youth rejecting the expedient and demanding the impossible;

of youth eternally desirable, enchanting, and elusive. It was as if his

orderly, complacent, and tranquil soul had plunged suddenly into a bath

of golden air. Vaguely disturbed, he drew back and tried to appear

dignified in spite of the fluttering pigeon. He had no inclination for

a flirtation with the Governor's daughter--intuitively he felt that such

an adventure would not be a safe one; but if a flirtation were what she

wanted, he told himself, with a sense of impending doom, "there might be

trouble." He didn't know what she meant, but whatever it was, she

evidently meant it with determination. Already she had impressed him

with the quality which, for want of a better word, he thought of as

"wildness." It was a quality which he had found strangely, if secretly,

alluring, and he acknowledged now that this note of "wildness," of

unexpectedness, of "something different" in her personality, had held

his gaze chained to the airy flutter of her scarlet skirt. He felt

vaguely troubled. Something as intricate and bewildering as impulse was

winding through the smoothly beaten road of his habit of thought. The

noises of the city came to him as if they floated over an immeasurable

distance of empty space. Through the spectral boughs of the sycamores

the golden sky had faded to the colour of ashes. And both the empty

space and the ashen sky seemed to be not outside of himself, but a part

of the hidden country within his mind.

"You were at the ball," she burst out suddenly, as if she had been

holding back the charge from the beginning.

"At the ball?" he repeated, and the words were spoken with his lips

merely in that objective world of routine and habit. "Yes, I was there.

It was a dull business."

She laughed again with the lack of merriment he had noticed before.

Though her face was made for laughter, there was an oddly conflicting

note of tragedy in her voice. "Was it dull? I didn't notice."

"Then you must have enjoyed it?"

"But you were there. You saw what happened. Every one must have seen."

Her savage candour brushed away the flimsy amenities. He knew now that

she would say whatever she pleased, and, with the pigeon clasped tightly

in his arms, he waited for anything that might come.

"You pretend that you don't know, that you didn't see!" she asked

indignantly.

As she looked at him he thought--or it may have been the effect of the

shifting light--that her eyes diffused soft green rays beneath her black

eyelashes. Was there really the mist of tears in her sparkling glance?

"I am sorry," he said simply, being a young man of few words when the

need of speech was obvious. The last thing he wanted, he told himself,

was to receive the confidences of the Governor's daughter.

At this declaration, so characteristic of his amiable temperament, her

anger flashed over him. "You were not sorry. You know you were not, or

you would have made them kinder!"

"Kinder? But how could I?" He felt that her rage was making her

unreasonable. "I didn't know you. I hadn't even been introduced to you."

It was on the tip of his tongue to add, "and I haven't been yet--" but

he checked himself in fear of unchaining the lightning. It was all

perfectly true. He had not even been introduced to the girl, and here

she was, as crude as life and as intemperate, accusing him of

indifference and falsehood. And after all, what had they done to her? No

one had been openly rude. Nothing had been said, he was sure, absolutely

nothing. It had been a "charity entertainment," and the young people of

his set had merely left her alone, that was all. The affair had been far

from exclusive--for the enterprising ladies of the Beech Tree Day

Nursery had prudently preferred a long subscription list to a limited

social circle--and in a gathering so obscurely "mixed" there were,

without doubt, a number of Gideon Vetch's admirers. Was it maliciously

arranged by Fate that Patty Vetch's social success should depend upon

the people who had elected her father to office?

"As if that mattered!"

Her scorn of his subterfuge, her mocking defiance of the sacred formula

to which he deferred, awoke in him an unfamiliar and pleasantly piquant

sensation. Through it all he was conscious of the inner prick and sting

of his disapprobation, as if the swift attraction had passed into a

mental aversion.

"As if that mattered!" he echoed gaily, "as if that mattered at all!"

Her face changed in the twilight, and it seemed to him that he saw her

for the first time with the peculiar vividness that came only in dreams

or in the hidden country within his mind. The sombre arch of the sky,

the glimmer of lights far away, the clustering shadows against the white

field of snow, the vague ghostly shapes of the sycamores--all these

things endowed her with the potency of romantic adventure. In the winter

night she seemed to him to exhale the roving sweetness of spring. Then

she spoke, and the sharp brightness of his vision was clouded by the old

sense of unreality.

"They treated me as if I were a piece of bunting or a flower in a pot,"

she said. "They left me alone in the dressing-room. No one spoke to me,

though they must have known who I was. They know, all of them, that I am

the Governor's daughter."

With a start he brought himself back from the secret places. "But I

thought you carried your head very high," he answered, "and you did not

appear to lack partners." Some small ironic demon that seemed to dwell

in his brain and yet to have no part in his real thought, moved him to

add indiscreetly: "I thought you danced every dance with Julius Gershom.

That's the name of that dark fellow who's a politician of doubtful cast,

isn't it?"

She made a petulant gesture, and the red wings in her hat vibrated like

the wings of a bird in flight. There flashed though his mind while he

watched her the memory of a cardinal he had seen in a cedar tree against

the snow-covered landscape. Strange that he could never get away from

the thought of a bird when he looked at her.

"Oh, Julius Gershom! I despise him!"

She shivered, and he asked with a sympathy he had not displayed for

mental discomforts: "Aren't you dreadfully chilled? This kind of thing

is a risk, you know. You might catch influenza--or anything."

"Yes, I might, if there is any about," she replied tartly, and he saw

with relief that her petulance had faded to dull indifference. "I was

obliged to dance with somebody," she resumed after a minute, "I couldn't

sit against the wall the whole evening, could I? And nobody else asked

me,--but I don't like him any the better for that."

"And your father? Does he dislike him also?" he asked.

"How can one tell? He says he is useful." There was a playful tenderness

in her voice.

"Useful? You mean in politics?"

She laughed. "How else in the world can any one be useful to Father? It

must be freezing."

"No, it is melting; but it is too cold to play about out of doors."

"Your teeth are chattering!" she rejoined with scornful merriment.

"They are not," he retorted indignantly. "I am as comfortable as you

are."

"Well, I'm not comfortable at all. Something--I don't know what it

was--happened to my ankle. I think I twisted it when I fell."

"And all this time you haven't said a word. We've talked about nothing

while you must have been in pain."

She shook her head as if his new solicitude irritated her, and a quiver

of pain--or was it amusement?--crossed her lips. "It isn't the first

time I've had to grit my teeth and bear things--but it's getting worse

instead of better all the time, and I'm afraid I shall have to ask you

to help me up the hill. I was waiting until I thought I could manage it

by myself."

So that was why she had kept him! She had hoped all the time that she

could go on presently without his aid, and she realized now that it was

impossible. Insensibly his judgment of her softened, as if his romantic

imagination had spun iridescent cobwebs about her. By Jove, what pluck

she had shown, what endurance! There came to him suddenly the

realization that if she had learned to treat a sprained ankle so

lightly, it could mean only that her short life had been full of

misadventures beside which a sprained ankle appeared trivial. She could

"play the game" so perfectly, he grasped, because she had been obliged

either to play it or go under ever since she had been big enough to read

the cards in her hand. To be "a good sport" was perhaps the best lesson

that the world had yet taught her. Though she could not be, he decided,

more than eighteen, she had acquired already the gay bravado of the

experienced gambler with life.

"Let me help you," he said eagerly, "I am sure that I can carry you, you

are so small. If you will only let me throw away this confounded bird, I

can manage it easily."

"No, give it to me. It would die of cold if we left it." She stretched

out her hand, and in silence he gave her the wounded pigeon. Her

tenderness for the bird, conflicting as it did with his earlier

impression of her, both amused and perplexed him. He couldn't reconcile

her quick compassion with her resentful and mocking attitude toward

himself.

At his impulsive offer of help the quiver shook her lips again, and

stooping over she did something which appeared to him quite unnecessary

to one gray suede shoe. "No, it isn't as bad as that. I don't need to be

carried," she said. "That sort of thing went out of fashion ages ago. If

you'll just let me lean on you until I get up the hill."

She put her hand through his arm; and while he walked slowly up the

hill, he decided that, taken all in all, the present moment was the most

embarrassing one through which he had ever lived. The fugitive gleam,

the romantic glamour, had vanished now. He wondered what it was about

her that he had at first found attractive. It was the spirit of the

place, he decided, nothing more. With every step of the way there closed

over him again his natural reserve, his unconquerable diffidence, his

instinctive recoil from the eccentric in behaviour. Conventions were the

breath of his young nostrils, and yet he was passing through an

atmosphere, without, thank Heaven, his connivance or inclination, where

it seemed to him the hardiest convention could not possibly survive.

When the lights of the mansion shone nearer through the bared boughs, he

heaved a sigh of relief.

"Have I tired you?" asked the girl in response, and the curious lilting

note in her voice made him turn his head and glance at her in sudden

suspicion. Had she really hurt herself, or was she merely indulging some

hereditary streak of buffoonery at his expense? It struck him that she

would be capable of such a performance, or of anything else that invited

her amazing vivacity. His one hope was that he might leave her in some

obscure corner of the house, and slip away before anybody capable of

making a club joke had discovered his presence. The hidden country was

lost now, and with it the perilous thrill of enchantment.

He rang the bell, and the door was opened by an old coloured butler who

had been one of the family servants of the Culpepers. How on earth,

Stephen wondered, could the Governor tolerate the venerable Abijah, the

chosen companion of Culpeper children for two generations? While he

wondered he recalled something his mother had said a few weeks ago about

Abijah's having been lured away by the offer of absurd wages. "You

needn't worry," she had added shrewdly, "he will return as soon as he

gets tired of working."

"I hurt my ankle, Abijah," said the girl.

"You ain't, is you, Miss Patty?" replied Abijah, in an indulgent tone

which conveyed to Stephen's delicate ears every shade of difference

between the Vetchs' and the Culpepers' social standing.

"How are you, Abijah?" remarked the young man with the air of lordly

pleasantry he used to all servants who were not white. Beyond the fine

old hall he saw the formal drawing-room and the modern octagonal

dining-room at the back of the house.

"Howdy, Marse Stephen," responded the negro, "I seed yo' ma yestiddy en

she sutney wuz lookin well an' peart."

He opened the door of the library, and while Stephen entered the room

with the girl's hand on his arm, a man rose from a chair by the fire and

came forward.

"Father, this is Mr. Culpeper," remarked Patty calmly, as she sank on a

sofa and stretched out her frivolous shoes.

In the midst of his embarrassment Stephen wondered resentfully how she

had discovered his name.