"Yes, I'm going. Come as soon as you can," she said; and catching up her satin train, she descended the oak staircase to the drawing-room, where a fire was burning and the lights were shaded in crimson. Twenty minutes later, seated at the round table, which was bright with chrysanthemums in tall silver vases, she looked with a feeling of resentment at George's empty place. Why was he so careless? Time had for him, she realized, as little meaning as words had. Then, in the midst of her disquietude, she caught the serene blue eyes of George's mother fixed upon her. With her young face, her red lips, and her superb shoulders rising out of the rich black lace of her gown, Mrs. Fowler looked almost beautiful. Had Patty not been present, with her loveliness like a summer's day, her mother would have seemed hardly more than a girl; but who could shine while Patty, beside that long, lean man with the gray imperial, smiled with lips that were like a scarlet flower in her face? There were only four guests, but these four, as Mrs. Fowler had said, "counted for something." The long, lean man beside Patty was one Colonel Buffington, a Virginia lawyer, who had wandered North in search of food in the barren years after the war. As his mind was active in a patient accumulative fashion, he had become in time a musty storehouse of war anecdotes, and achieving but moderate success in his law practice, his chief distinction, perhaps, was as a professional Southerner. Combining a genial charm of manner with as sterile an intellect as it is possible to attain, he was generally regarded as a perfect example of "the old school," and this picturesque reputation made him desirable as a guest at club dinners as well as at the larger gatherings of the various Southern societies. His conversation, which was entirely anecdotal, consisted of an elaborate endless chain of more or less historical "stories." Social movements and the development of civilization interested him as little as did art or science--for which he entertained a chronic suspicion due to the indiscretions of Darwin. Change of any kind was repugnant to his deeper instincts, and of all changes the ones relating to the habits of women appeared to him to interfere most unwarrantably with the Creator's original plan. For the rest he had the heart of a child, would strip the clothes from his back to give to a friend, or even to an enemy, and possessed an infallible gift for making a dinner successful.