She nodded a gracious apology to all, entered her wheel-chair, and was rolled heavily away for her daily siesta.
* * * * * Everybody appeared to be friendly to him, even cordial.

Mrs.Acton Carrick talked to him in her pretty, decisive, animated manner, a feminine reflection of her father's characteristic energy and frankness.
Her younger sister, Cecile, possessed a drawl like her mother's.
Petite, distractingly pretty, Hamil recognised immediately her attraction--experienced it, amused himself by yielding to it as he exchanged conventionally preliminary observations with her across the table.
Men, on first acquaintance, were usually very easily captivated, for she had not only all the general attraction of being young, feminine, and unusually ornamental, but she also possessed numberless individualities like a rapid fire of incarnations, which since she was sixteen had kept many a young man, good and true, madly guessing which was the real Cecile.

And yet all the various and assorted Ceciles seemed equally desirable, susceptible, and eternally on the verge of being rounded up and captured; that was the worst of it; and no young man she had ever known had wholly relinquished hope.

For even in the graceful act of side-stepping the smitten, the girl's eyes and lips seemed unconsciously to unite in a gay little unspoken promise--"This serial story is to be continued in our next--perhaps." As for the other people at the table Hamil began to distinguish one from another by degrees; the fair-haired Anans, sister and brother, who spoke of their celebrated uncle, Winslow Anan, and his predictions concerning Hamil as his legitimate successor; Marjorie Staines, willowy, active, fresh as a stem of white jasmine, and inconsequent as a very restless bird; Philip Gatewood, grave, thin, prematurely saddened by the responsibility of a vast inheritance, consumed by a desire for an artistic career, looking at the world with his owlish eyes through the prismatic colors of a set palette.
There were others there whom as yet he had been unable to differentiate; smiling, well-mannered, affable people who chattered with more or less intimacy among themselves as though accustomed to meeting one another year after year in this winter rendezvous.

And everywhere he felt the easy, informal friendliness and goodwill of these young people.
"Are you being amused ?" asked Shiela beside him.