"Oh, he couldn't have helped it," responded Mary Byrd. "Every one saw her. She was dressed very conspicuously."
"Do you imply that you were not?" inquired her father, without facetious intention.
Mary Byrd beamed indulgently in his direction. "Oh, you don't know what it is to be conspicuous, dear," she answered. "What did you think of her dress, Stephen?"
He met her question with a blush. Was he really so modest after the war and France and everything?—Victoria wondered in silence.
"It was something red, wasn't it?" he rejoined vaguely.
"It was scarlet tulle." Mary Byrd, as her mother had once observed, "hadn't an indefinite bone in her body." Then she imparted an additional incident. "She got it badly torn. I saw her pinning it up in the dressing-room."
"I should have been sorry for her," said Margaret simply; and he felt that he had never in his life been so nearly in love with her.
"Is she pretty?" asked Mrs. Culpeper, appealing directly to Stephen as a man and an authority. It was the question the strange woman had put to him in the Square, and ironical mirth seized the young man as he remembered.
"Do you think her pretty, Stephen?" repeated Margaret, and waited, with an expression of impartial interest, for his reply.
For an instant he hesitated. Did he think Patty Vetch pretty or not? "I hardly know," he answered. "I suppose it depends upon whether you like that kind of thing or not. Why don't you ask Peyton?" At the time he couldn't have told himself whether he admired Patty or not. She surprised him, she struck a new note, the note of the unexpected, but whether he liked or disliked it, he could not tell. "There is something unusual about her," he concluded hurriedly, feeling that he had not been quite fair.