One Man in His Time

by Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow

That Margaret was looking very sweet indeed, Stephen acknowledged as soon as he entered the room, where the firelight suffused the Persian rugs (which had replaced the earlier Brussels carpet woven in a mammoth floral design), the elaborately carved and twisted rosewood chairs and sofas, upholstered in ruby-coloured brocade, the few fine old pieces of Chippendale or Heppelwhite, the massive crystal chandelier, and the precise copies of Italian paintings in gorgeous Florentine frames. Here and there hung a family portrait, one of Amanda Culpeper, a famous English beauty, with a long nose and a short upper lip, not unlike Victoria's. This painting, which was supposed to be by Sir Joshua Reynolds, was a source of unfailing consolation to Victoria, though Stephen preferred the Sully painting of his grandmother, Judith Randolph, who reminded him in some subtle way of Margaret Blair. In his childhood he had believed this drawing-room to be the most beautiful place on earth, and he never entered it now without a feeling of regret for a shattered illusion.

As he took Margaret's hand her expression of intelligent sympathy went straight to his heart; and he told himself emphatically that after all the familiar graces in women were the most lovable. She was a small fragile girl, with a lovely oval face, nut-brown hair that grew in a "widow's peak" on her forehead, and the prettiest dark blue eyes in the world. Her figure drooped slightly in the shoulders, and was, as Mary Byrd pointed out in her dashing way, "without the faintest pretence to style." But if Margaret lacked "style," she possessed an unconscious grace which seemed to Stephen far more attractive. It was delightful to watch the flowing lines of her clothes, as if, he used to imagine in a fanciful strain, she were poured out of some slender porcelain vase. Her dress to-night, of delicate blue crêpe, began slightly below the throat and reached almost to her ankles. It was a fashion which he had always admired; but he realized that it gave Margaret, who was only twenty-two, a quaint air of maturity.

"I am so sorry I am late," he said, "but I had to go back to the office for a paper I'd forgotten." It was the truth as far as it went; and yet because it was not the whole truth, because his delay was due, not to his return for the paper, but to his meeting with Patty Vetch in the Square, his conscience pricked him uncomfortably. 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. How little, after all, did any one know of Gideon Vetch? Since he had been in office what had they learned except that he was approachable in human relations and unapproachable in political ones?

"I wonder if Stephen noticed the girl at the ball?" said Mrs. Culpeper suddenly, looking tenderly at her son across the lovely George II candlesticks and the dish of expensive fruit, for she could never reconcile with her ideas of economy the spending of a penny on decorations so ephemeral as flowers.