ried to be honest. It seems to me that a mother's wish should
carry a great deal of weight in such matters."

"It ought to," assented Corinna, "but I've never heard of its doing so."

"Everything would have been satisfactory if he had not allowed himself
to be carried away by a foolish fancy."

"I cannot imagine," said Corinna primly, "that Stephen could ever be
foolish. It gives me hope of him."

Impaling her, as if she had been a butterfly, with a glance as sharp as
a needle, Mrs. Culpeper demanded sternly, "How much do you know of this
affair, my dear?"

In spite of her natural courage Corinna was seized with a shiver of
apprehension. "Do you think it is an affair?" she asked.

"I think it is worse. I think it is an infatuation."

"What, Stephen? Not really?" Corinna's voice was mirthfully incredulous.

"I have seen the girl once or twice," resumed Mrs. Culpeper, "and she
seems to me objectionable from every point of view."

"Only from the Culpeper one," protested Corinna. "I find her very
attractive."

"Well, I do not." Mrs. Culpeper had relapsed into her tone of habitual
martyrdom. "If Stephen chooses to kill me," she added, "he may do it."

Corinna leaned toward her ingratiatingly. "Don't you admit, Cousin
Harriet, that I have improved Patty tremendously?"

"I see no difference."

"Oh, but there is one--a great difference! If you had come to one of the
Governor's receptions last winter, you couldn't have told that she
wasn't--well, one of us. She has been so quick to pick up things that it
is amazing."

Mrs. Culpeper lifted the transparent mesh from the point of her nose.
"Do you know," she demanded, "that the girl was born in a circus tent?"

"So I have heard. It was a romantic beginning."

Foiled but undaunted, the older woman fixed on Corinna the stare with
which she would have attempted the conversion of an undraped pagan if
she had ever encountered one. Though she was unconscious of the fact as
she sat there, suffering yet unbending, in the Florentine chair, she
represented the logical result of the conservative principle in nature,
of the spirit that forgets nothing and learns nothing, of the instinct
of the type to reproduce itself, without variation or development, until
the pattern is worn too thin to endure. That Stephen had inherited this
passive force, Corinna knew, but she knew also, that it was threatened
by his incurable romanticism, by that inarticulate longing for heroic
adventu