He was an incurious and gay young man, of active sporting interests and immaculate appearance, with so few of the moral attributes of the Culpepers that his mother sometimes wondered how he could possibly be the son of his father.
Indeed there were times when this wonder extended to Mary Byrd, for it seemed incredible that anything so "advanced" as the outlook of these two should have been a legitimate offspring of either the Culpeper or the Warwick point of view.
"He would be all right," maintained Janet, "if he would only marry Margaret.

I am sure she likes him." "Oh, I don't know.

There's that young clergyman," rejoined Hatty, "and Margaret is so pious.

I suppose that's why she has never been popular with men." "My dear child," breathed Mrs.Culpeper in remonstrance, and she added emphatically, as if the doubt were a disparagement of Stephen's attractions, "Of course she likes him.

Why, it would be a perfectly splendid marriage for Margaret Blair." "It isn't possible," asked Mary Byrd, for if her manners were modern, her prejudices were old-fashioned, "that Stephen could have met any one else over there ?" She was wearing an elaborate, very short and very low gown of pink velvet, not one of the simple blue or gray silk dresses, with modest round necks, in which her sisters attired themselves in the evening.