ian architecture, was still suffused
for them with the sentimental glamour of their wedding day. The walls,
untouched for years, were covered with embossed paper and panelled in
yellow oak. The furniture, protected for five months of the year by
covers of striped linen, was stiffly upholstered in pea-green brocade;
and the pictures, hanging very high, were large but inferior oil
paintings in heavily gilded frames that represented preposterous sheaves
of wheat or garlands of roses. Forty years ago the house reproduced
within and without "the best taste" of the period, and was as bad as the
Berkeleys could afford to make it. Since then fashions had come and
gone; yet the hospitable home remained as unchanged as the politics of
the host or the figure of the hostess. The Berkeleys were still content
to be "old-fashioned people," with the fine feeling and the
indiscriminate taste of an era which had flowered not in architecture
but in character, when the standard of living was high and the style in
furniture correspondingly low. To-night the ten guests (the Berkeleys
never gave large dinners) had been carefully chosen, and the evening
would probably be distinguished by good talk and good wine. Though they
were law-abiding persons to the core, the bitterness of the Eighteenth
Amendment had not penetrated to the subterranean darkness where Mr.
Berkeley's treasures were stored.

Mrs. Berkeley, a brisk, compact little woman, with a pretty florid face
and the prominent bosom and tapering waist of forty years ago, turned
from the Governor as Corinna and the Judge entered, and hurried forward
in her animated way, which reminded one of the manner of a child that is
trying to make a success of a dolls' party. Beyond Mr. Berkeley, a
short, neutral-tinted man without emphasis of personality, Corinna saw
Mrs. Stribling's tall, full figure draped in a gown of jade-coloured
velvet, with a daringly short skirt from which a narrow, sharply pointed
train wound like a serpent. Her heavy hair, of an unusual shade of pale
gold, had the smooth, polished look of metal which had been moulded in
waves close to her head. In spite of her active life and her disastrous
affairs, she presented an unblemished complexion, as if her hard rosy
surface were protected by some indestructible glaze. Beside her opulent
attractions the frail prettiness of Alice Rokeby, who was dining out for
the first time this winter, looked wistful and pathetic. Every one,
exce