Epes went on into the dining room, opening darkly beyond, leaving Sumatra with candles on the floor before a tall mirror. There, bearing a high silver candlestick and a following indeterminate illumination, he discovered a bottle of champagne, tagged the ship _Nautilus_ and the year, and gathered two high glasses and some ice. He was tingling with excitement, a disturbance deeper than physical. He felt oddly detached from his late life, the commonplace and irresponsible; his mind was without images, thought--it was like a whirling of crackling colored lights. He found his situation--the uncorked champagne, the two glasses, the unsuspecting near presence of his father, Sumatra, rearranged, entering the dining room--extraordinary and invigorating. The wine foamed whitely through the ice, turning into a silky clear amber that stung his lips. Sumatra observed, sitting down, that she ought to go on to the cotillon at once. “What,” she demanded, “will James Saltonstall think?” That, Epes replied, was of singularly small importance. The rose flush had returned to her cheeks, her eyes were shining; she was decidedly more attractive than he had admitted. But that, he made up his mind, he’d never tell her. She sipped and sipped from her glass; that in itself was unusual, startling. No, he corrected his impression, it would have been in any other girl of Sumatra’s age, but not in her. The most unexpected, inappropriate things seemed to become her perfectly. “I don’t want to go,” she added, so long after her other phrase that he almost lost the connection. “We are so different,” Sumatra pointed out; “I hardly ever do what I don’t want to. It’s a good thing for your father I’m not you.” “It wouldn’t make any difference,” he said, listlessness again falling over him; “in the end it would be the same; you’d stay or go as he said.” “I would not.” “Oh, yes, but you would.” “He couldn’t make me,” she insisted; “not about that. It’s too terribly important.” Epes became annoyed. “Can’t you understand that, to my father, nothing is important except what he wants?” “Why argue?” she decided. “After all, I am not you. And yet, even as it is, I believe if I were concerned, which I’m not, I could do what I decided with him.” He laughed. “Try, and if you are successful, why--why, I’d marry you instead of Annice.” The flush deepened painfully in her countenance; she regarded him with startled eyes. For a moment there was a ridiculously tense silence; and then, relaxing, she shook her head negatively. “It wouldn’t be any good; you’d have no regard for me.” “Regard for you!” he exclaimed. “If you did that I’d think more of you than anything else on earth; more than I did of--of the _Triton_.” His voice, his manner darkened. “But you mustn’t; there’s a lot you don’t understand--my father, first of all. He can be very nasty.”