The room was characterless, but finely and generously proportioned, and not so blatantly new as the rest of the colonel's house still looked. Against the dark walls the pale-coloured gowns around the table were charming. Indeed, most of the gowns were designed for this setting.
For there were no outsiders among the Colonel's guests to-night. Sometimes there were distinguished outsiders, politicians and other big men, diverted from triumphant tours through larger centres by the Colonel's influence, and by his courtesy exhibited to Green River after they had dined, or bigger men still, whose comings and goings the public press was not permitted to chronicle. Sometimes, too, there were outsiders on probation, the outer fringe of Green River society, admitted to formal functions, and hoping in vain to penetrate to intimate ones; ladies flustered and flattered, gentlemen sulky but flattered, conscious that each appearance here might be their last, and trying to seem indifferent to the fact.
But this was the Colonel's inner circle, gathered by telephone at twenty-four hours' notice, as they so often were. No course that the chef had contributed to the rather too elaborate menu was new to them. The Pol Roger which the big English butler was just starting on his second round was of the vintage year usually to be found on the Colonel's wine list, and on most intelligently supervised wine lists. A dinner for twelve, like plenty of little dinners elsewhere, no more correct and no less, but it had this to distinguish it; it was being served in Green River.
Served complete from hors-d'oeuvres to liqueurs, in a New England town where high tea had been the fashion not ten years ago, and church suppers were still important occasions--where you were rich on five thousand a year, and there were not a dozen capitalists secure of so much, where a second maid was an object of pride, and there was no butler except the Colonel's. And he had imported this butler and his chef and his wines, but not his guests; they were quite as impressive, quite able to appreciate his hospitality, if not to return it in kind, and they were all but one native products of Green River.
The youngest guest was eating mushrooms _sous cloche_ in contented silence at the Colonel's left. The scene was not new to her. She could not remember her first party here; she was probably the only person in Green River who could pass over that momentous occasion so lightly. She had grown up as the only child in the inner circle. She had been privileged to excuse herself, when the formal succession of courses at some holiday function was too much for her, and read fairy tales on a cushion by the library fire, out of the fat, purple edition de luxe of the "Arabian Nights" that was always waiting for her there. Though her white ruffled skirts had grown long now, and her silvery gold braids were pinned up, and she was allowed to fill an empty place at the Colonel's table whenever he asked her, if not quite on his regular dinner list yet, Judith was not much changed from that wide-eyed child, and to-night her eyes looked sleepy and soft, as if she had serious thoughts of the cushion by the fire and the fairy book still.