tranquillity with separate brick or stone or white dwellings in the
lengthening afternoon shadows of vivid maples.

It was as different as possible from all that Linda had known, from
the elaborate hotels and gigantic apartment houses, the tropical
interiors, of her New York life. She unpacked her bag, putting her
gold toilet things on the chest of drawers, precisely arranging in a
shallow closet what clothes she had brought, and then, changing,
went down to the Lowries.

They surveyed her with eminent approval at a dinner-table lighted
only with candles, beside long windows open on a dusk with a glimmer
of fireflies. Suddenly Linda felt amazingly at ease; it seemed to
her that she had sat here before, with the night flowing gently in
over the candle-flames. The conversation, she discovered, never
strayed far from the concerns and importance of the Lowrie blood.
"My grandmother, Natalie Vigne," Elouise informed her, "came with
her father to Philadelphia from France, in eighteen hundred and one,
at the invitation of Stephen Girard, who was French as well. She
married Hallet Lowrie whose mother was a Bartram.

"That, my dear, explains our black hair and good figgers. There
never was a lumpy Lowrie. Well, Hallet built this house, or rather
enlarged it, for his wife; and it has never been out of the family.
Our nephew, Arnaud Hallet--Arnaud was old Vigne's name--owns it now.
Isaac Hallet, you may recall, was suspected of being a Tory; at any
rate his brother's descendants, Fanny Rodwell is the only one left,
won't speak."

The placid conversation ran on unchanged throughout dinner and the