She took the rocking-chair he brought for her and leaned back in it without speaking. Her maroon-colored evening gown suggested that whoever planned it had been somewhat straitened by economy, but it did well by her rich complexion and creditable figure. Her features were creditable too, the dark hair a little too heavy, perhaps, and the expression, defined as it is apt to be when one is thirty-five, not wholly satisfying. In truth, the countenance, like the gown, suffered a little from economy, a sparseness of the things one loves best in a woman's face. Half the sensitiveness belonging to her husband's eyes and mouth would have made her beautiful.
"It is a pity the Barkers have such a bad night for their party," Cowart said.
"The reception is at the Fieldings';" and again he felt himself rebuked.
"I'm afraid I didn't think much about the matter after you told me the Dillinghams were coming by for you in their carriage. Fortunately neither family holds us college people to very strict social account."
"They have their virtues, even if they are so vulgar as to be rich."
"Why, I believe I had just been thinking, before you came in, that it is only the rich who have any virtues at all." He managed to speak genially, but the consciousness that she was waiting for him to make conversation, as she had waited for the chair, stiffened upon him like frost.
He cast about for something to say, but the one interest which he would have preferred to keep to himself was all that presented itself to his grasp. "I have often thought," he suggested, "that if only we were in sight of the Gulf, our landscape in early summer might not be very unlike that of ancient Greece." She looked at him a little blankly, and he drew one of his books nearer and began turning its leaves.
"I thought you were correcting your mathematics papers."
"I am, or have been; but I am reading Theocritus, too."
"Well, I don't see anything in a day like this to make anybody think of summer. The dampness goes to your very marrow."