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.