When deceit was so easy it ceased to be a temptation.
She looked at him with an expression of guileless sympathy.

"After working all day I should think you would be tired," she murmured.

That was the way she would always cover up his errors, large or small, he knew, with a trusting sweetness which made him feel there was dishonour in the merest tinge of dissimulation.
Mary Byrd was talking as usual in high fluting notes which drowned the gentle ripple of Margaret's voice.
"I was just telling Margaret about the charity ball," she said, "and the way the girls snubbed Patty Vetch in the dressing-room." "And it was a very good account of young barbarians at play," commented Mr.Culpeper, who was a romantic soul and still read his Byron.
"Patty Vetch?
Why, isn't that the daughter of the Governor ?" asked Mrs.
Culpeper, without a trace of her husband's sympathy for the victim of the "snubbing." A moment later, in accordance with her mental attitude of evasive idealism, she added briskly: "I try not to think of that man as Governor of Virginia." Of course the subject had come up.

Wherever Stephen had been in the past few weeks he had found that the conversation turned to the Governor; and it struck him, while he followed the line of girls headed by his mother's erect figure into the dining-room, that, for good or bad, the influence of Gideon Vetch was as prevalent as an epidemic.

All through the long and elaborate meal, in which the viands that his ancestors had preferred were served ceremoniously by slow-moving coloured servants, he listened again to the familiar discussion and analysis of the demagogue, as he still called him.