"Miss Catherwood, I may have come where I was not wanted, but I shall not do so again."
He walked toward the door, his head high. Miss Grayson looked at Miss Catherwood in surprise.
The girl raised her hand as if about to make a detaining gesture, but she let it drop again, and without another word Prescott passed out of the house.
One of the formal receptions, occurring twice a month, was held the next evening by the President of the Confederacy and his wife. Prescott and all whom he knew were there.
The parlours were crowded already with people—officers, civilians, curious transatlantic visitors—and more than one workman in his rough coat, for all the world was asked to come to the President's official receptions. They had obeyed the order, too, and came with their bravest faces and bravest apparel. In the White House of the Confederacy there were few somber touches that night.
The President and his wife, he elderly and severe of countenance, she young and mild, received in one of the parlours all who would shake the hand of Mr. Davis. It was singularly like a reception at that other White House on the Potomac, and the South, in declaring that she would act by herself, still followed the old patterns.
It was a varied gathering, varied in appearance, manners and temper. The official and civil society of the capital never coalesced well. The old families of Richmond, interwoven with nearly three centuries of life in Virginia, did not like all these new people coming merely with the stamp of the Government upon them, which was often, so they thought, no stamp at all; but with the ceaseless and increasing pressure from the North they met now on common ground at the President's official reception, mingling without constraint.
Prescott danced three times with Helen Harley and walked twice with her in the halls. She was at her best that night, beautiful in a gentle, delicate way, but she did not whip his blood like a wind from the hills, and he was surprised to find how little bitterness he felt when he saw her dancing with Mr. Sefton or walking with the great cavalry General like a rose in the shadow of an oak. But he loved her, he told himself again; she was the one perfect woman in the world, the one whom he must make his wife, if he could. These men were not to be blamed for loving her, too; they could not help it.
Then his eye roved to Colonel Harley, who, unlike General Wood, was as much at home here as in the field, his form expanding, his face in a glow, paying assiduous attention to Mrs. Markham, who used him as she would. He watched them a little, and, though he liked Mrs. Markham, he reflected that he would not be quite so complacent if he were in General Markham's place.