u 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
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 Pari