"Oh, they don't mind, they're such jolly beggars," replied the girl in a cheerful, slangy manner, "and besides they get all they want of me. I'm so sorry you didn't come in time for tea. Now I'm just starting for a ride with Alan."
While she was speaking a man on horseback turned from the lane into the drive, and Caroline saw her face change and brighten until it became almost pretty. "There he is now!" she exclaimed, and then she called out impulsively, "Oh, Alan, I've waited for ever!"
He shouted back some words in a gay voice, but Caroline did not catch them, and before he dismounted, Mrs. Colfax led her through the open door into the hall.
"That's Alan Wythe," said the old lady in a whisper, and she resumed a moment later when they stood within the pink silk walls of Angelica's drawing-room, "Mary has been engaged to him for a year, and I never in my life saw a girl so much in love. I suppose it's natural enough—he's charming—but in my day young ladies were more reserved. And now we'll go straight upstairs to Angelica. She is sure to be lying down at this hour."
As they passed through the wide hall, and up the beautiful Colonial staircase, Caroline felt that the luxury of the place bewildered her. Though the house, except in size, was not unlike country homes she had seen in southside Virginia, there was nothing in her memory, unless she summoned back stray recollections of photographs in Sunday newspapers, that could compare with the decoration of the drawing-room. "It is beautiful, but there is too much of it," she thought, for her eyes, accustomed to bare surfaces and the formal purity of Sheraton and Chippendale, were beginning to discriminate.
"I want you to notice everything when you have time," said Mrs. Colfax. "I tell Angelica that it is a liberal education just to come inside of this house."
"It would take weeks to see it," responded Caroline; and then, as she moved toward a long mirror in the hall upstairs, it seemed to her that her reflection, in her severe blue serge suit, with the little round blue hat Diana had trimmed, looked as grotesquely out of place as if she had been one of the slender Sheraton chairs at The Cedars. "If I appear a lady I suppose it is as much as I can hope for," she thought, "and besides nobody will notice me."
The humour leaped to her eyes, while Mrs. Colfax, watching her with a side-long glance, reflected that Carrie Warwick's daughter had distinction. Her grace was not merely the grace of a slender body with flowing lines; it was the grace of word, of glance, of smile, of gesture, that indefinable and intangible quality which is shed by a lovely soul as fragrance is shed by a flower. "Even if she lives to be as old as I am, she will still keep her poise and her charm of appearance," thought the old lady, "she will never lose it because it isn't a matter of feature—it isn't dependent on outward beauty. Years ago she was prettier than she is to-day, but she wasn't nearly so distinguished." Aloud she said presently, "Your hair grows in such a nice line on your forehead, my dear, just like your mother's. I remember we always made her brush hers straight back as you do, so she could show her 'widow's peak' in the centre. But yours is much darker, isn't it?"
"Yes, it is almost black. Mother's was the loveliest shade of chestnut. I have a lock of it in an old breast-pin."
A door at the end of the hall opened, and a thin woman, in rusty black alpaca, came to meet them.