"Why, he never even mentions the war," she protested.

"I don't care. I believe he thinks about it," insisted Janet, who would
never surrender a point after she had once made it.

"He's different, anyhow," said Hatty, the one who had everything, as her
mother asserted, to make her pretty, and yet wasn't. "He isn't nearly so
normal. Is he, Mother?"

Mrs. Culpeper raised troubled eyes from the skirt of her pale gray silk
gown which she was scrutinizing dejectedly. "How on earth could I have
got that spot there?" she remarked in her brisk yet soft voice. "I am
afraid you are right, dear, about Stephen. He certainly hasn't been like
himself for some time. I have felt really anxious, I suppose it was the
war."

While the war had lasted she had seen it, according to her habit of
vision, with peculiar intentness, and she had seen nothing else; but
from the beginning to the end, it had appeared to her mainly as an
international disturbance which had upset the serene and regular course
of her family affairs. For the past two years she had refused to think
of it except under pressure; and then she recalled it only as the
occasion when Victoria and Stephen had been in France, and poor Peyton
in a training camp. Her feeling had been violent, but entirely personal,
while Mr. Culpeper, who possessed the martial patriotism characteristic
of Virginians of his class and generation, had been animated by the
sacrificial spirit of a hero.

"Oh, Stephen is all right," declared Peyton, who felt impelled to take
the side of his brother in a family discussion. He was an incurious and