His dark hair, brushed back from his forehead, had the shining gloss that comes of good living and careful grooming, and this gloss was reflected in his smiling gray eyes and in the healthy red of his well-cut though not quite generous mouth.

He was a charming guest, an impressive speaker, a sympathetic listener; yet there had always seemed to Corinna to be a subtle deficiency in his character.

It was only of late, since their friendship had turned into a warmer feeling, that she had been able to overcome that sense of something wanting which had troubled her when she was with him.

She could define no quality that was absent; but the impression he still gave her at times was one of a man tremendously gifted and yet curiously inadequate.
A mental thinness perhaps?
An emotional dryness?
Or was it merely that here also she felt, rather than perceived, the intrinsic weakness of the old order?
Beyond Benham, Gideon Vetch, rugged, sanguine, and wearing the wrong tie with his evening clothes as valiantly as he had worn the rumpled brown suit in which Stephen had last seen him, was talking in a loud voice to Miss Maria Berkeley--one of those serene single women arrayed in dove-colour who belong as appropriately as crewel work or antimacassars to another century.

If Patty was shy and self-conscious, it was evident that her state of mind was not shared by her father.