gay young man, of active sporting interests and immaculate appearance,
with so few of the moral attributes of the Culpepers that his mother
sometimes wondered how he could possibly be the son of his father.
Indeed there were times when this wonder extended to Mary Byrd, for it
seemed incredible that anything so "advanced" as the outlook of these
two should have been a legitimate offspring of either the Culpeper or
the Warwick point of view.

"He would be all right," maintained Janet, "if he would only marry
Margaret. I am sure she likes him."

"Oh, I don't know. There's that young clergyman," rejoined Hatty, "and
Margaret is so pious. I suppose that's why she has never been popular
with men."

"My dear child," breathed Mrs. Culpeper in remonstrance, and she added
emphatically, as if the doubt were a disparagement of Stephen's
attractions, "Of course she likes him. Why, it would be a perfectly
splendid marriage for Margaret Blair."

"It isn't possible," asked Mary Byrd, for if her manners were modern,
her prejudices were old-fashioned, "that Stephen could have met any one
else over there?" She was wearing an elaborate, very short and very low
gown of pink velvet, not one of the simple blue or gray silk dresses,
with modest round necks, in which her sisters attired themselves in the
evening. A little later she and Peyton would go on to a dance; for her
mother's consternation when the frock had been unpacked from its Paris
wrappings had been temporarily mitigated by the assertion that unless
one danced in gowns like that, one simply couldn't be expected to dance
at all. "Of course, if you wish me to be a wall-flower like Margaret