vening with Stephen Culpeper, she shrank from him with a disgust which
was made all the keener by contrast. A pitiless light had fallen over
Gershom while he stood there beside her, as if his bad taste and his
pathetic ambition to appear something that he was not, had become
exaggerated into positive vices. She was too young to perceive the
essential pathos of all wasted effort, of all misdirected attempts to
overcome the disadvantages of ignorance; and while she looked at him
now, she saw only the vulgarity. Like all those who have suffered from
insufficient opportunities and wounded pride, Patty Vetch was without
mercy for the very weaknesses that she had risen above. After the
evening at the Berkeleys' she felt that she should be less ashamed of a
drunkard than of a man who wore diamonds because he thought that it was
the correct thing to do. She remembered suddenly that on her fourteenth
birthday she had bought a pair of paste earrings with ten dollars her
father had given her; and for the sting of this reminder she knew that
she should never forgive Gershom. Oh, she had no patience with a man who
couldn't find out things and learn without asking questions! Hadn't she
tried and tried, and made mistakes and tried again, and still gone on
trying by hook or by crook; as her father would say, to find out the
thousand and one things she oughtn't to do? If she, even as a child, had
struggled so hard to improve herself and change in the right way, not
the wrong way--then why shouldn't he? Her father, of course, wasn't
polished, but he was as unlike Gershom as if they had been born as far
apart as the poles. Even to her untrained eyes it was evident that Vetch
possessed the authority of personality--a sanction that was not social
but moral. Some inherent dislike for anything that was not solid, that
was not genuine, had served Vetch as a kind of aesthetic discrimination.

"I know Benham," Gershom was saying eagerly. "I've worked with him.
Smart chap, don't you think? Ever heard him speak?"

"No, I hate speeches."

"Did he and the Governor have any words?"

"Of course they didn't--not at dinner," she replied with a crushing
manner. "Father is waiting for you."

"Then you'll see me to-morrow? I've got a lot I want to say to you. And
I'll tell you this right now, Patty, my dear, you may run round with
these high-faluting chaps like Culpeper as much as you please; but how
many dinner parties do you think you'd be invited to