As far as Corinna was concerned, she felt that she might as well have been a view from the window, or the portrait of Mr.Berkeley's great aunt that hung over the mantelpiece.

He had probably, she reflected, classified her lightly as "another gray-haired woman," and passed on to Rose Stribling, who bloomed triumphantly between John Benham and Stephen Culpeper.

Vetch was so different from what Corinna had expected to find him that, in some vague way, she felt disappointed and absurdly resentful.

Had her imagination, she wondered, prepared her to meet one of the picturesque radicals of fiction?
Had she looked for a middle-aged Felix Holt; and was this why the Governor's prosaic figure, his fresh-coloured, undistinguished face and his vehement, spectacular gestures, dispelled immediately the interest she had felt in the meeting?
There were no salient points in his appearance, nothing that she could detach from the rest in her mental image of him.

There was no single characteristic of which she could say: "He may be common; he may be vulgar; but he strikes the note of greatness here--and here--and here." With such a man, she felt, the direct and obvious appeal of Rose Stribling would be victorious.