.

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 girl