They were all three in the library, as customary; and Linda, restless, saw her reflection in a closed long window. She was wearing yellow, the color of the jonquils on a candle-stand; but with her familiar sash tied and the ends falling to the hem of her skirt. The pointed oval of her face was unchanged, her pallor, the straight line of her black bang, the blueness of her eyes, were as they had been a surprisingly long while ago. Arnaud, with a disconcerting comprehension, demanded, “Well, are you satisfied?” She replied coolly, “Entirely.” Pleydon, seated for over an hour without moving, or even the trivial relief of a cigarette, followed her with his luminous uncomfortable gaze, his disembodied passion. XXX Linda heard Vigné's laugh, the expression of a sheer lightness of heart, following a low eager murmur of voices in her daughter's room, and she was startled by its resemblance to the gay pitch of Mrs. Moses Feldt's old merriment. Three of Vigné's friends were with her, all approximately eighteen, talking, Linda knew, men and--it was autumn--anticipating the excitements of their bow to formal society that winter. They had, she silently added, little enough to learn about the latter. Through the year past they had been to a dancing-class identical, except for an earlier hour and age, with mature affairs; but before that they had been practically introduced to the pleasures of their inheritance. The men were really boys at the university, past the first year, receptacles of unlimited worldly knowledge and experience. They belonged to exclusive university societies and eating clubs, and Linda found their stiff similarity of correct bigoted pattern highly entertaining. She had no illusions about what might be called their morals; they were midway in the period of youthful unrestraint; but she recognized as well that their attitude toward, for example, Vigné was irreproachable. Such boys affected to disdain the girls of their associated families ... or imagined themselves incurably in love. The girls, for their part, while insisting that forty was the ideal age for a lover--the terms changed with the seasons, last year “suitor” had been the common phrase--were occasionally swept in young company into a high irrational passion. Mostly, through skillful adult pressure or firm negation, such affairs came to nothing; but even these were sometimes overcome. And, when Linda had been disturbed by the echo of old days in her daughter's tones, she was considering exactly such a state. One of the nicest youths imaginable, Bailey Sandby, had lost all trace of superior aloofness in a devotion to Vigné. He was short, squarely built, with clear pink cheeks, steady light blue eyes and crisp very fair hair. This was his last season of academic instruction, after which a number of years, at an absurdly low payment, awaited him in his father's bond brokerage concern. However, he was, Linda gathered, imperious in his urgent need for Vigné's favor.