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VIRGINIA
By ELLEN GLASGOW
GARDEN CITY NEW YORK
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
MCMXIII
_Copyright, 1913, by_
Doubleday, Page & Company
_All rights reserved, including that of
translation into Foreign Languages,
including the Scandinavian._
TO THE RADIANT SPIRIT WHO WAS MY SISTER CARY GLASGOW McCORMACK
CONTENTS
BOOK FIRST--THE DREAM
I. The System
II. Her Inheritance
III. First Love
IV. The Treadwells
V. Oliver, the Romantic
VI. A Treadwell in Revolt
VII. The Artist in Philistia
VIII. White Magic
IX. The Great Man Moves
X. Oliver Surrenders
BOOK SECOND--THE REALITY
I. Virginia Prepares for the Future
II. Virginia's Letters
III. The Return
IV. Her Children
V. Failure
VI. The Shadow
VII. The Will to Live
VIII. The Pang of Motherhood
IX. The Problem of the South
BOOK THIRD--THE ADJUSTMENT
I. The Changing Order
II. The Price of Comfort
III. Middle-age
IV. Life's Cruelties
V. Bitterness
VI. The Future
BOOK FIRST
THE DREAM
CHAPTER I
THE SYSTEM
Toward the close of a May afternoon in the year 1884, Miss Priscilla
Batte, having learned by heart the lesson in physical geography she
would teach her senior class on the morrow, stood feeding her canary on
the little square porch of the Dinwiddie Academy for Young Ladies. The
day had been hot, and the fitful wind, which had risen in the direction
of the river, was just beginning to blow in soft gusts under the old
mulberry trees in the street, and to scatter the loosened petals of
syringa blossoms in a flowery snow over the grass. For a moment Miss
Priscilla turned her flushed face to the scented air, while her eyes
rested lovingly on the narrow walk, edged with pointed bricks and
bordered by cowslips and wallflowers, which led through the short garden
to the three stone steps and the tall iron gate. She was a shapeless yet
majestic woman of some fifty years, with a large mottled face in which a
steadfast expression of gentle obstinacy appeared to underly the more
evanescent ripples of thought or of emotion. Her severe black silk gown,
to which she had just changed from her morning dress of alpaca, was
softened under her full double chin by a knot of lace and a cameo brooch
bearing the helmeted profile of Pallas Athene. On her head she wore a
three-cornered cap trimmed with a ruching of organdie, and beneath it
her thin gray hair still showed a gleam of faded yellow in the sunlight.
She had never been handsome, but her prodigious size had endowed her
with an impressiveness which had passed in her youth, and among an
indulgent people, for beauty. Only in the last few years had her
fleshiness, due to rich food which she could not resist and to lack of
exercise for which she had an instinctive aversion, begun seriously to
inconvenience her.
Beyond the wire cage, in which the canary spent his involuntarily
celibate life, an ancient microphylla rose-bush, with a single imperfect
bud blooming ahead of summer amid its glossy foliage, clambered over a
green lattice to the gabled pediment of the porch, while the delicate
shadows of the leaves rippled like lace-work on the gravel below. In the
miniature garden, where the small spring blossoms strayed from the prim
beds into the long feathery grasses, there were syringa bushes, a little
overblown; crape-myrtles not yet in bud; a holly tree veiled in bright
green near the iron fence; a flowering almond shrub in late bloom
against the shaded side of the house; and where a west wing put out on
the left, a bower of red and white roses was steeped now in the faint
sunshine. At the foot of the three steps ran the sunken moss-edged
bricks of High Street, and across High Street there floated, like
wind-blown flowers, the figures of Susan Treadwell and Virginia
Pendleton.
Opening the rusty gate, the two girls tripped with carefully held
flounces up the stone steps and between the cowslips and wallflowers
that bordered the walk. Their white lawn dresses were made with the
close-fitting sleeves and the narrow waists of the period, and their
elaborately draped overskirts were looped on the left with graduated
bows of light blue ottoman ribbon. They wore no hats, and Virginia, who
was the shorter of the two, had fastened a Jacqueminot rose in the thick
dark braid which was wound in a wreath about her head. Above her arched
black eyebrows, which lent an expression of surprise and animation to
her vivid oval face, her hair was parted, after an earlier fashion,
under its plaited crown, and allowed to break in a mist of little curls
over her temples. Even in repose there was a joyousness in her look
which seemed less the effect of an inward gaiety of mind than of some
happy outward accident of form and colour. Her eyes, very far apart and
set in black lashes, were of a deep soft blue--the blue of wild
hyacinths after rain. By her eyes, and by an old-world charm of
personality which she exhaled like a perfume, it was easy to discern
that she embodied the feminine ideal of the ages. To look at her was to
think inevitably of love. For that end, obedient to the powers of Life,
the centuries had formed and coloured her, as they had formed and
coloured the wild rose with its whorl of delicate petals. The air of a
spoiled beauty which rested not ungracefully upon her was sweetened by
her expression of natural simplicity and goodness.
For an instant she stood listening in silence to the querulous pipes of
the bird and the earnest exhortations of the teacher on the joys of cage
life for both bird and lady. Then plucking the solitary early bud from
the microphylla rose-bush, she tossed it over the railing of the porch
on the large and placid bosom of Miss Priscilla.
"Do leave Dicky alone for a minute!" she called in a winning soprano
voice.
At the sound, Miss Priscilla dropped the bit of cake she held, and
turned to lean delightedly over the walk, while her face beamed like a
beneficent moon through the shining cloud of rose-leaves.
"Why, Jinny, I hadn't any idea that you and Susan were there!"
Her smile included Virginia's companion, a tall, rather heavy girl, with
intelligent grey eyes and fair hair cut in a straight fringe across her
forehead. She was the daughter of Cyrus Treadwell, the wealthiest and
therefore the most prominent citizen of the town, and she was also as
intellectual as the early eighties and the twenty-one thousand
inhabitants of Dinwiddie permitted a woman to be. Her friendship for
Virginia had been one of those swift and absorbing emotions which come
to women in their school-days. The stronger of the two, she dominated
the other, as she dominated every person or situation in life, not by
charm, but by the force of an energetic and capable mind. Though her
dress matched Virginia's in every detail, from the soft folds of tulle
at the neck to the fancy striped stockings under the _bouffant_
draperies, the different shapes of the wearers gave to the one gown an
air of decorous composure and to the other a quaint and appealing grace.
Flushed, ardent, expectant, both girls stood now at the beginning of
womanhood. Life was theirs; it belonged to them, this veiled, radiant
thing that was approaching. Nothing wonderful had come as yet--but
to-morrow, the day after, or next year, the miracle would happen, and
everything would be different! Experience floated in a luminous mystery
before them. The unknown, which had borrowed the sweetness and the
colour of their illusions, possessed them like a secret ecstasy and
shone, in spite of their shyness, in their startled and joyous look.
"Father asked me to take a message over to General Goode," explained
Virginia, with a little laugh as gay as the song of a bird, "but I
couldn't go by without thanking you for the cherry bounce. I made mother
drink some of it before dinner, and it almost gave her an appetite."
"I knew it was what she needed," answered Miss Priscilla, showing her
pleasure by an increasing beam. "It was made right here in the house,
and there's nothing better in the world, my poor mother used to say, to
keep you from running down in the spring. But why can't you and Susan
come in and sit a while?"
"We'll be straight back in a minute," replied Susan before Virginia
could answer. "I've got a piece of news I want to tell you before any
one else does. Oliver came home last night."
"Oliver?" repeated Miss Priscilla, a little perplexed. "You don't mean
the son of your uncle Henry, who went out to Australia? I thought your
father had washed his hands of him because he had started play-acting or
something?" Curiosity, that devouring passion of the middle-aged, worked
in her breast, and her placid face grew almost intense in expression.
"Yes, that's the one," replied Susan. "They went to Australia when
Oliver was ten years old, and he's now twenty-two. He lost both his
parents about three years ago," she added.
"I know. His mother was my cousin," returned Miss Priscilla. "I lost
sight of her after she left Dinwiddie, but somebody was telling me the
other day that Henry's investments all turned out badly and they came
down to real poverty. Sarah Jane was a pretty girl and I was always very
fond of her, but she was one of the improvident sort that couldn't make
two ends meet without tying them into a bow-knot."
"Then Oliver must be just like her. After his mother's death he went to
Germany to study, and he gave away the little money he had to some
student he found starving there in a garret."
"That was generous," commented Miss Priscilla thoughtfully, "but I
should hardly call it sensible. I hope some day, Jinny, that your father
will tell us in a sermon whether there is biblical sanction for
immoderate generosity or not."
"But what does he say?" asked Virginia softly, meaning not the rector,
but the immoderate young man.
"Oh, Oliver says that there wasn't enough for both and that the other
student is worth more to the world than he is," answered Susan. "Then,
of course, when he got so poor that he had to pawn his clothes or
starve, he wrote father an almost condescending letter and said that as
much as he hated business, he supposed he'd have to come back and go to
work. 'Only,' he added, 'for God's sake, don't make it tobacco!' Wasn't
that dreadful?"
"It was extremely impertinent," replied Miss Priscilla sternly, "and to
Cyrus of all persons! I am surprised that he allowed him to come into
the house."
"Oh, father doesn't take any of his talk seriously. He calls it
'starvation foolishness,' and says that Oliver will get over it as soon
as he has a nice little bank account. Perhaps he will--he is only
twenty-two, you know--but just now his head is full of all kinds of new
ideas he picked up somewhere abroad. He's as clever as he can be,
there's no doubt of that, and he'd be really good-looking, too, if he
didn't have the crooked nose of the Treadwells. Virginia has seen him
only once in the street, but she's more than half in love with him
already."
"Do come, Susan!" remonstrated Virginia, blushing as red as the rose in
her hair. "It's past six o'clock and the General will have gone if we
don't hurry." And turning away from the porch, she ran between the
flowering syringa bushes down the path to the gate.
Having lost his bit of cake, the bird began to pipe shrilly, while Miss
Priscilla drew a straight wicker chair (she never used rockers) beside
the cage, and, stretching out her feet in their large cloth shoes with
elastic sides, counted the stitches in an afghan she was knitting in
narrow blue and orange strips. In front of her, the street trailed
between cool, dim houses which were filled with quiet, and from the hall
at her back there came a whispering sound as the breeze moved like a
ghostly footstep through an alcove window. With that strange power of
reflecting the variable moods of humanity which one sometimes finds in
inanimate objects, the face of the old house had borrowed from the face
of its mistress the look of cheerful fortitude with which her generation
had survived the agony of defeat and the humiliation of reconstruction.
After nineteen years, the Academy still bore the scars of war on its
battered front. Once it had watched the spectre of famine stalk over the
grass-grown pavement, and had heard the rattle of musketry and the roar
of cannon borne on the southern breeze that now wafted the sounds of the
saw and the hammer from an adjacent street. Once it had seen the flight
of refugees, the overflow of the wounded from hospitals and churches,
the panic of liberated slaves, the steady conquering march of the army
of invasion. And though it would never have occurred to Miss Priscilla
that either she or her house had borne any relation to history (which
she regarded strictly as a branch of study and visualized as a list of
dates or as a king wearing his crown), she had, in fact, played a modest
yet effective part in the rapidly changing civilization of her age. But
events were powerless against the genial heroism in which she was
armoured, and it was characteristic of her, as well as of her race,
that, while she sat now in the midst of encircling battlefields, with
her eyes on the walk over which she had seen the blood of the wounded
drip when they were lifted into her door, she should be brooding not
over the tremendous tragedies through which she had passed, but over the
lesson in physical geography she must teach in the morning. Her lips
moved gently, and a listener, had there been one, might have heard her
murmur: "The four great alluvial plains of Asia--those of China and of
the Amoo Daria in temperate regions; of the Euphrates and Tigris in the
warm temperate; of the Indus and Ganges under the Tropic--with the Nile
valley in Africa, were the theatres of the most ancient civilizations
known to history or tradition----"
As she ended, a sigh escaped her, for the instruction of the young was
for her a matter not of choice, but of necessity. With the majority of
maiden ladies left destitute in Dinwiddie after the war, she had turned
naturally to teaching as the only nice and respectable occupation which
required neither preparation of mind nor considerable outlay of money.
The fact that she was the single surviving child of a gallant
Confederate general, who, having distinguished himself and his
descendants, fell at last in the Battle of Gettysburg, was sufficient
recommendation of her abilities in the eyes of her fellow citizens. Had
she chosen to paint portraits or to write poems, they would have rallied
quite as loyally to her support. Few, indeed, were the girls born in
Dinwiddie since the war who had not learned reading, penmanship ("up to
the right, down to the left, my dear"), geography, history, arithmetic,
deportment, and the fine arts, in the Academy for Young Ladies. The
brilliant military record of the General still shed a legendary lustre
upon the school, and it was earnestly believed that no girl, after
leaving there with a diploma for good conduct, could possibly go wrong
or become eccentric in her later years. To be sure, she might remain a
trifle weak in her spelling (Miss Priscilla having, as she confessed, a
poor head for that branch of study), but, after all, as the rector had
once remarked, good spelling was by no means a necessary accomplishment
for a lady; and, for the rest, it was certain that the moral education
of a pupil of the Academy would be firmly rooted in such fundamental
verities as the superiority of man and the aristocratic supremacy of the
Episcopal Church. From charming Sally Goode, now married to Tom
Peachey, known familiarly as "honest Tom," the editor of the Dinwiddie
_Bee_, to lovely Virginia Pendleton, the mark of Miss Priscilla was
ineffaceably impressed upon the daughters of the leading families.
Remembering this now, as she was disposed to do whenever she was
knitting without company, Miss Priscilla dropped her long wooden needles
in her lap, and leaning forward in her chair, gazed out upon the town
with an expression of child-like confidence, of touching innocence. This
innocence, which belonged to the very essence of her soul, had survived
both the fugitive joys and the brutal disillusionments of life.
Experience could not shatter it, for it was the product of a courage
that feared nothing except opinions. Just as the town had battled for a
principle without understanding it, so she was capable of dying for an
idea, but not of conceiving one. She had suffered everything from the
war except the necessity of thinking independently about it, and, though
in later years memory had become so sacred to her that she rarely
indulged in it, she still clung passionately to the habits of her
ancestors under the impression that she was clinging to their ideals.
Little things filled her days--the trivial details of the classroom and
of the market, the small domestic disturbances of her neighbours, the
moral or mental delinquencies of her two coloured servants--and even her
religious veneration for the Episcopal Church had crystallized at last
into a worship of customs.
To-day, at the beginning of the industrial awakening of the South, she
(who was but the embodied spirit of her race) stood firmly rooted in all
that was static, in all that was obsolete and outgrown in the Virginia
of the eighties. Though she felt as yet merely the vague uneasiness with
which her mind recoiled from the first stirrings of change, she was
beginning dimly to realize that the car of progress would move through
the quiet streets before the decade was over. The smoke of factories was
already succeeding the smoke of the battlefields, and out of the ashes
of a vanquished idealism the spirit of commercial materialism was born.
What was left of the old was fighting valiantly, but hopelessly, against
what had come of the new. The two forces filled the streets of
Dinwiddie. They were embodied in classes, in individuals, in articles of
faith, in ideals of manners. The symbol of the one spirit was the
memorial wreaths on the battlefields; of the other it was the prophetic
smoke of the factories. From where she stood in High Street, she could
see this incense to Mammon rising above the spires of the churches,
above the houses and the hovels, above the charm and the provincialism
which made the Dinwiddie of the eighties. And this charm, as well as
this provincialism, appeared to her to be so inalienable a part of the
old order, with its intrepid faith in itself, with its militant
enthusiasm, with its courageous battle against industrial evolution,
with its strength, its narrowness, its nobility, its blindness, that,
looking ahead, she could discern only the arid stretch of a civilization
from which the last remnant of beauty was banished forever. Already she
felt the breaking of those bonds of sympathy which had held the
twenty-one thousand inhabitants of Dinwiddie, as they had held the
entire South, solidly knit together in a passive yet effectual
resistance to the spirit of change. Of the world beyond the borders of
Virginia, Dinwiddians knew merely that it was either Yankee or foreign,
and therefore to be pitied or condemned according to the Evangelical or
the Calvinistic convictions of the observer. Philosophy, they regarded
with the distrust of a people whose notable achievements have not been
in the direction of the contemplative virtues; and having lived
comfortably and created a civilization without the aid of science, they
could afford not unreasonably to despise it. It was a quarter of a
century since "The Origin of Species" had changed the course of the
world's thought, yet it had never reached them. To be sure, there was an
old gentleman in Tabb Street whose title, "the professor," had been
conferred in public recognition of peaceful pursuits; but since he never
went to church, his learning was chiefly effective when used to point a
moral from the pulpit. There was, also, a tradition that General Goode
had been seen reading Plato before the Battle of Seven Pines; and this
picturesque incident had contributed the distinction of the scholar to
the more effulgent glory of the soldier. But for purely abstract
thought--for the thought that did not construct an heroic attitude or a
concrete image--there was as little room in the newer industrial system
as there had been in the aristocratic society which preceded it. The
world still clung to the belief that the business of humanity was
confined to the preservation of the institutions which existed in the
present moment of history--and Dinwiddie was only a quiet backwater into
which opinions, like fashions, were borne on the current of some
tributary stream of thought. Human nature in this town of twenty-one
thousand inhabitants differed from human nature in London or in the
Desert of Sahara mainly in the things that it ate and the manner in
which it carried its clothes. The same passions stirred its heart, the
same instincts moved its body, the same contentment with things as they
are, and the same terror of things as they might be, warped its mind.
The canary fluted on, and from beyond the mulberry trees there floated
the droning voice of an aged negress, in tatters and a red bandanna
turban, who persuasively offered strawberries to the silent houses.
"I'se got sw-eet straw-ber'-ies! I'se got swe-e-t str-aw-ber'-ies!
Yes'm, I'se got sw-e-et straw-ber'ies des f'om de coun-try!"
Then, suddenly, out of nothing, it seemed to Miss Priscilla, a miracle
occurred! The immemorial calm of High Street was broken by the sound of
rapidly moving wheels (not the jingling rattle of market wagons nor the
comfortable roll of doctors' buggies), and a strange new vehicle,
belonging to the Dinwiddie Livery Stables, and containing a young man
with longish hair and a flowing tie, turned the corner by Saint James'
Church, and passed over the earthen roadbed in front of the green
lattice. As the young man went by, he looked up quickly, smiled with the
engaging frankness of a genial nature, and lifting his hat with a
charming bow, revealed to Miss Priscilla's eyes the fact that his hair
was thick and dark as well as long and wavy. While he looked at her, she
noticed, also, that he had a thin, high-coloured face, lighted by a pair
of eager dark eyes which lent a glow of impetuous energy to his
features. The Treadwell nose, she recognized, but beneath the Treadwell
nose there was a clean-shaven, boyish mouth which belied the Treadwell
nature in every sensitive curve and outline.
"I'd have known him anywhere from Susan's description," she thought, and
added suspiciously, "I wonder why he peered so long around that corner?
It wouldn't surprise me a bit if those girls were coming back that way."
Impelled by her mounting excitement, she leaned forward until the ball
of orange-coloured yarn rolled from her short lap and over the polished
floor of the porch. Before she could stoop to pick it up, she was
arrested by the reappearance of the two girls at the corner beyond which
Oliver had gazed so intently. Then, as they drew nearer, she saw that
Virginia's face was pink and her eyes starry under their lowered lashes.
An inward radiance shone in the girl's look, and appeared to shape her
soul and body to its secret influence. Miss Priscilla, who had known her
since the first day she came to school (with her lunch, from which she
refused to be parted, tightly tied up in a red and white napkin), felt
suddenly that she was a stranger. A quality which she had never realized
her pupil possessed had risen supreme in an instant over the familiar
attributes of her character. So quickly does emotion separate the
individual from the inherent soul of the race.
Susan, who was a little in advance, came rapidly up the walk, and the
older woman greeted her with the words:
"My dear, I have seen him!"
"Yes, he just passed us at the corner, and I wondered if you were
looking. Do tell us what you think of him."
She sat down in a low chair by the teacher's side, while Virginia went
over to the cage and stood gazing thoughtfully at the singing bird.
"Well, I don't think his nose spoils him," replied Miss Priscilla after
a minute, "but there's something foreign looking about him, and I hope
Cyrus isn't thinking seriously about putting him into the bank."
"That was the first thing that occurred to father," answered Susan, "but
Oliver told me last night while we were unpacking his books--he has a
quantity of books and he kept them even when he had to sell his
clothes--that he didn't see to save his life how he was going to stand
it."
"Stand what?" inquired Miss Priscilla, a trifle tartly, for after the
vicissitudes of her life it was but natural that she should hesitate to
regard so stable an institution as the Dinwiddie Bank as something to be
"stood." "Why, I thought a young man couldn't do better than get a place
in the bank. Jinny's father was telling me in the market last Saturday
that he wanted his nephew John Henry to start right in there if they
could find room for him."
"Oh, of course, it's just what John Henry would like," said Virginia,
speaking for the first time.
"Then if it's good enough for John Henry, it's good enough for Oliver, I
reckon," rejoined Miss Priscilla. "Anybody who has mixed with beggars
oughtn't to turn up his nose at a respectable bank."
"But he says it's because the bank is so respectable that he doesn't
think he could stand it," answered Susan.
Virginia, who had been looking with her rapt gaze down the deserted
street, quivered at the words as if they had stabbed her.
"But he wants to be a writer, Susan," she protested. "A great many very
nice people are writers."
"Then why doesn't he go about it in a proper way, if he isn't ashamed of
it?" asked the teacher, and she added reflectively after a pause, "I
wish he'd write a good history of the war--one that doesn't deal so much
with the North. I've almost had to stop teaching United States history
because there is hardly one written now that I would let come inside my
doors."
"He doesn't want to write histories," replied Susan. "Father suggested
to him at supper last night that if he would try his hand at a history
of Virginia, and be careful not to put in anything that might offend
anybody, he could get it taught in every private school in the State.
But he said he'd be shot first."
"Perhaps he's a genius," said Virginia in a startled voice. "Geniuses
are always different from other people, aren't they?"
"I don't know," answered Susan doubtfully. "He talks of things I never
heard of before, and he seems to think that they are the most important
things in the world."
"What things?" asked Virginia breathlessly.
"Oh, I can't tell you because they are so new, but he seems on fire when
he talks of them. He talks for hours about art and its service to
humanity and about going down to the people and uplifting the masses."
"I hope he doesn't mean the negroes," commented Miss Priscilla
suspiciously.
"He means the whole world, I believe," responded Susan. "He quotes all
the time from writers I've never heard of, and he laughs at every book
he sees in the house. Yesterday he picked up one of Mrs. Southworth's
novels on mother's bureau and asked her how she could allow such immoral
stuff in her room. She had got it out of the bookcase to lend to Miss
Willy Whitlow, who was there making my dress, but he scolded her so
about it that at last Miss Willy went off with Mill's 'Essay on
Liberty,' and mother burned all of Mrs. Southworth's that she had in the
house. Oliver has been so nice to mother that I believe she would make a
bonfire of her furniture if he asked her to do it."
"Is he really trying to unsettle Miss Willy's mind?" questioned the
teacher anxiously. "How on earth could she go out sewing by the day if
she didn't have her religious convictions?"
"That's just what I asked him," returned Susan, who, besides being
dangerously clever, had a remarkably level head to keep her balanced.
"But he answered that until people got unsettled they would never move,
and when I wanted to find out where he thought poor little Miss Willy
could possibly move to, he only got impatient and said that I was trying
to bury the principle under the facts. We very nearly quarrelled over
Miss Willy, but of course she took the book to please Oliver and
couldn't worry through a line of it to save her soul."
"Did he say anything about his work? What he wants to do, I mean?" asked
Virginia, and her voice was so charged with feeling that it gave an
emotional quality to the question.
"He wants to write," replied Susan. "His whole heart is in it, and when
he isn't talking about reaching the people, he talks about what he calls
'technique.'"
"Are you sure it isn't poetry?" inquired Miss Priscilla, humming back
like a bee to the tempting sweets of conjecture. "I've always heard that
poetry was the ruination of Poe."
"No, it isn't poetry--not exactly at least--it's plays," answered Susan.
"He talked to me till twelve o'clock last night while we were arranging
his books, and he told me that he meant to write really great dramas,
but that America wasn't ready for them yet and that was why he had had
to sell his clothes. He looked positively starved, but he says he
doesn't mind starving a while if he can only live up to his ideal."
"Well, I wonder what his ideal is?" remarked Miss Priscilla grimly.
"It has something to do with his belief that art can grow only out of
sacrifice," said Susan. "I never heard anybody--not even Jinny's father
in church--talk so much about sacrifice."
"But the rector doesn't talk about sacrifice for the theatre," retorted
the teacher, and she added with crushing finality, "I don't believe
there is a particle of sense in it. If he is going to write, why on
earth doesn't he sit straight down and do it? Why, when little Miss
Amanda Sheppard was left at sixty without a roof over her head, she
began at once, without saying a word to anybody, to write historical
novels."
"It does seem funny until you talk with him," admitted Susan. "But he is
so much in earnest that when you listen to him, you can't help believing
in him. He is so full of convictions that he convinces you in spite of
yourself."
"Convictions about what?" demanded Miss Priscilla. "I don't see how a
young man who refuses to be confirmed can have any convictions."
"Well, he has, and he feels just as strongly about them as we do about
ours."
"But how can he possibly feel as strongly about a wrong conviction as we
do about a right one?" insisted the older woman stubbornly, for she
realized vaguely that they were approaching dangerous ground and set out
to check their advance in true Dinwiddie fashion, which was strictly
prohibitive.
"I like a man who has opinions of his own and isn't ashamed to stand up
for them," said Virginia with a resolution that made her appear suddenly
taller.
"Not _false_ opinions, Jinny!" rejoined Miss Priscilla, and her manner
carried them with a bound back to the schoolroom, for her mental vision
saw in a flash the beribboned diploma for good conduct which her
favourite pupil had borne away from the Academy on Commencement day two
years ago, and a shudder seized her lest she should have left a single
unprotected breach in the girl's mind through which an unauthorized idea
might enter. Had she trusted too confidently to the fact that Virginia's
father was a clergyman, and therefore spiritually armed for the defence
and guidance of his daughter? Virginia, in spite of her gaiety, had been
what Miss Priscilla called "a docile pupil," meaning one who
deferentially submitted her opinions to her superiors, and to go through
life perpetually submitting her opinions was, in the eyes of her parents
and her teacher, the divinely appointed task of woman. Her education
was founded upon the simple theory that the less a girl knew about life,
the better prepared she would be to contend with it. Knowledge of any
sort (except the rudiments of reading and writing, the geography of
countries she would never visit, and the dates of battles she would
never mention) was kept from her as rigorously as if it contained the
germs of a contagious disease. And this ignorance of anything that could
possibly be useful to her was supposed in some mysterious way to add to
her value as a woman and to make her a more desirable companion to a man
who, either by experience or by instinct, was expected "to know his
world." Unlike Susan (who, in a community which offered few
opportunities to women outside of the nursery or the kitchen, had been
born with the inquiring spirit and would ask questions), Virginia had
until to-day accepted with humility the doctrine that a natural
curiosity about the universe is the beginning of infidelity. The chief
object of her upbringing, which differed in no essential particular from
that of every other well-born and well-bred Southern woman of her day,
was to paralyze her reasoning faculties so completely that all danger of
mental "unsettling" or even movement was eliminated from her future. To
solidify the forces of mind into the inherited mould of fixed beliefs
was, in the opinion of the age, to achieve the definite end of all
education. When the child ceased to wonder before the veil of
appearances, the battle of orthodoxy with speculation was over, and Miss
Priscilla felt that she could rest on her victory. With Susan she had
failed, because the daughter of Cyrus Treadwell was one of those
inexplicable variations from ancestral stock over which the naturalists
were still waging their merry war; but Virginia, with a line of earnest
theologians and of saintly self-effacing women at her back, offered as
little resistance as some exquisite plastic material in the teacher's
hands.
Now, as if the same lightning flash which had illuminated the beribboned
diploma in Miss Priscilla's mind had passed to Virginia also, the girl
bit back a retort that was trembling on her lips. "I wonder if she can
be getting to know things?" thought the older woman as she watched her,
and she added half resentfully, "I've sometimes suspected that Gabriel
Pendleton was almost too mild and easy going for a clergyman. If the
Lord hadn't made him a saint, Heaven knows what would have become of
him!"
"Don't try to put notions into Jinny's head, Susan," she said after a
thoughtful pause. "If Oliver were the right kind of young man, he'd give
up this nonsense and settle down to some sober work. The first time I
get a chance I'm going to tell him so."
"I don't believe it will be any use," responded Susan. "Father tried to
reason with him last night, and they almost quarrelled."
"Quarrelled with Cyrus!" gasped the teacher.
"At one time I thought he'd walk out of the house and never come back,"
pursued Susan. "He told father that his sordid commercialism would end
by destroying all that was charming in Dinwiddie. Afterward he
apologized for his rudeness, but when he did so, he said, 'I meant every
word of it.'"
"Well, I never!" was Miss Priscilla's feeble rejoinder. "The idea of
his daring to talk that way when Cyrus had to pay his fare down from New
York."
"Of course father brought it on," returned Susan judicially. "You know
he doesn't like anybody to disagree with him, and when Oliver began to
argue about its being unscrupulous to write history the way people
wanted it, he lost his temper and said some angry things about the
theatre and actors."
"I suppose a great man like your father may expect his family to bow to
his opinions," replied the teacher, for so obscure was her mental
connection between the construction of the future and the destruction of
the past, that she could honestly admire Cyrus Treadwell for possessing
the qualities her soul abhorred. The simple awe of financial success,
which occupies in the American mind the vacant space of the monarchical
cult, had begun already to generate the myth of greatness around Cyrus,
and, like all other myths, this owed its origin less to the wilful
conspiracy of the few than it did to the confiding superstition of the
many.
"I hope Oliver won't do anything rash," said Susan, ignoring Miss
Priscilla's tribute. "He is so impulsive and headstrong that I don't see
how he can get on with father."
At this Virginia broke her quivering silence. "Can't you make him
careful, Susan?" she asked, and without waiting for an answer, bent over
and kissed Miss Priscilla on the cheek. "I must be going now or mother
will worry," she added before she tripped ahead of Susan down the steps
and along the palely shining path to the gate.
Rising from her chair, Miss Priscilla leaned over the railing of the
porch, and gazed wistfully after the girls' vanishing figures.
"If there was ever a girl who looked as if she were cut out for
happiness, it is Jinny Pendleton," she said aloud after a minute. A tear
welled in her eye, and rolling over her cheek, dropped on her bosom.
From some obscure corner of her memory, undevastated by war or by ruin,
her own youth appeared to take the place of Virginia's. She saw herself,
as she had seen the other an instant before, standing flushed and
expectant before the untrodden road of the future. She heard again the
wings of happiness rustling unseen about her, and she felt again the
great hope which is the challenge that youth flings to destiny. Life
rose before her, not as she had found it, but as she had once believed
it to be. The days when little things had not filled her thoughts
returned in the fugitive glow of her memory--for she, also, middle-aged,
obese, cumbered with trivial cares, had had her dream of a love that
would change and glorify the reality. The heritage of woman was hers as
well as Virginia's. And for the first time, standing there, she grew
dimly conscious of the portion of suffering which Nature had allotted to
them both from the beginning. Was it all waiting--waiting, as it had
been while battles were fought and armies were marching? Did the future
hold this for Virginia also? Would life yield nothing more to that
radiant girl than it had yielded to her or to the other women whom she
had known? Strange how the terrible innocence of youth had moved her
placid middle-age as if it were sadness!