The other two young women and Judith's mother, whose dark, low-browed Madonna beauty was gracious and fresh to-night, set off by her clear-blue gown, with a gardenia caught in her sheer, white scarf, deserved the Honourable Joseph Grant's flowery name for them, the Three Graces.
Before the Colonel's time and Judith's the Honourable Joe had been the most important man in Green River, and in evening things, and after a properly concocted cocktail he still looked it, florid and portly and well set-up, with a big voice that could still sound hearty though it rang rather empty and hollow sometimes. He looked ten years younger than his old friend, Judge Saxon. The Judge's coat was getting shiny at the seams, and--this appeared even more unfortunate to Judith--he was in the habit of pointing out that it was shiny, and without embarrassment. Mrs. Saxon's pearl-gray satin was of excellent quality, but of last year's cut, and the modest neck was filled in with the net guimpe which she affected at informal dinners. The Saxons were not quite in the picture, but they were always very kind to Judith.
And if they were not in the picture, Mrs. Joseph Grant, certainly not the youngest woman in the room, though she was not the oldest, occupied the centre of it.
She was like the picture of the beautiful princess on the hill of glass, in a book of Judith's, and besides, she had once been a real débutante, of the kind that Judith liked to read about in novels, before the Honourable Joe brought her from Boston to Green River. Judith liked to look at her better than any one here except Colonel Everard.
"Cosmopolitan--ten years ahead of Wells, or any town in your state; real give and take in the table talk; really pretty women; the same little group of people rubbing wits against each other day after day and getting them sharpened instead of dulled by it; a concentrated, pocket edition of a social life, but complete--nothing provincial about it," a very distinguished outsider had said after his last week-end with the Colonel.
But he was fresh from a visit to the state capital, the most provincial city in the state when the legislature was not in session; also he had a known weakness for pretty women. Green River did not admire the Colonel's circle so unreservedly, but Green River was jealous. Whatever you thought of it, it was made of fixed and unpromising material, and making it was no mean achievement, and the man at the head of the table looked capable of it, and of bigger things.