The car is coming for me, and I don't dine until eight.
Stay awhile and we'll talk," she added with her cheerful smile.

"I haven't seen you for ages, and you look as if you had something to tell me." "I have," he said; and then he turned from her to the two old men who were talking drowsily in voices that sounded as far off to Stephen as the murmuring of bees in summer meadows.

He knew that it was real, that it was the life he had always lived, and yet he couldn't get rid of the feeling that Corinna and the two old men and the charming surroundings were all part of a play, and that in a little while he should go out of the theatre and step back among the sordid actualities.
"The General and I are having our little chat before dinner," said Judge Page, a sufficiently ornamental old gentleman to have decorated any world or any fireside--imposing and distinguished as a portrait by Sir Thomas Lawrence, with a crown of silvery hair and the shining dark eyes of his daughter.

He still carried himself, for all his ironical comment, like an ambassador of the romantic school.

"It is a sad day for your fighting man," he concluded gaily, "when the only stimulant he can get is the conversation of an old fogy like me." "Your fighting man," old General Powhatan Plummer, who hadn't smelt powder for more than half a century, chuckled as he always did at the shrewd and friendly pleasantries of the Judge.