pt Corinna, who had been abroad at the time, knew of the old affair
between Alice Rokeby and John Benham; and every one who knew of it had
thought that they would be married as soon as she got her divorce. But
time had dragged on; Corinna had come home again; and Alice Rokeby's
violet eyes had grown deeper and more wistful, with a haunted look in
them as if they were denying a hungry heart. She had never dressed well;
she had never, as Mrs. Stribling remarked, known how to bring out her
best points; and to-night she had been even less successful than usual.
Both Corinna and Mrs. Stribling could have told her that she should have
avoided violent shades; and yet she was wearing now a dress of vivid
purple which made her pale rose-leaf complexion look almost sallow.
Though she could exercise when she chose a strangely passive attraction,
her charm usually failed in the end for lack of intelligent guidance.

A little beyond Alice Rokeby, where her eyes could follow his gestures,
John Benham was talking in his pleasant subdued voice to Patty Vetch,
who looked, in her frock of scarlet tulle, as if she had just alighted
from the chorus of a musical comedy. Her boyish dark head was bent over
a fan of scarlet feathers, a toy which appeared ridiculously large
beside her small figure. It was evident that the girl was trying to
cover an uncomfortable shyness with an air of mocking effrontery; and a
moment later, when Corinna joined them, Benham glanced up with a flash
of satirical amusement in his eyes. He was a tall thin man of middle
age, with a striking appearance and the straight composed features of an
early American portrait. His dark hair, brushed back from his forehead,
had the shining gloss that comes of good living and careful grooming,
and this gloss was reflected in his smiling gray eyes and in the healthy
red of his well-cut though not quite generous mouth. He was a charming
guest, an impressive speaker, a sympathetic listener; yet there had
always seemed to Corinna to be a subtle deficiency in his character. It
was only of late, since their friendship had turned into a warmer
feeling, that she had been able to overcome that sense of something
wanting which had troubled her when she was with him. She could define
no quality that was absent; but the impression he still gave her at
times was one of a man tremendously gifted and yet curiously inadequate.
A mental thinness perhaps? An emotional dryness? Or was it merely that