"Grief makes a person look like this," she thought. "I shall never be a

girl again--Oliver was right: I am the kind to break early." Then,

because to think of herself in the midst of such sorrow seemed to her

almost wicked, she turned away from the mirror, and laid her

crape-trimmed hat on the shelf in the wardrobe. She was wearing a dress

of black Henrietta cloth, which had been borrowed from one of her

neighbours who had worn mourning, and the blouse and sleeves hung with

an exaggerated fullness over her thin arms and bosom. All that had

distinguished her beauty--the radiance, the colour the flower-like

delicacy of bloom and sweetness--these were blotted out by her grief and

by the voluminous mourning dress of the nineties. A week had changed

her, as even Harry's illness had not changed her, from a girl into a

woman; and horrible beyond belief, with the exception of her mother, it

had changed nothing else in the universe! The tragedy that had ruined

her life had left the rest of the world--even the little world of

Dinwiddie--moving as serenely, as indifferently, on its way towards

eternity. On the morning of the funeral she had heard the same market

wagons rumble over the cobblestones, the same droning songs of the

hucksters, the same casual procession of feet on the pavement. A

passionate indignation had seized her because life could be so brutal to

death, because the terror and the pity that flamed in her soul shed no

burning light on the town where her father had worked and loved and

fought and suffered and died. A little later the ceaseless tread of

visitors to the rectory door had driven this thought from her mind, but

through every minute, while he lay in the closed room downstairs, while

she sat beside her mother in the slow crawling carriage that went to the

old churchyard, while she stood with bowed head listening to the words

of the service--through it all there had been the feeling that something

must happen to alter a world in which such a thing had been possible,

that life must stop, that the heavens must fall, that God must put forth

His hand and work a miracle in order to show His compassion and His

horror.

But nothing had changed. After the funeral her mother had come home with

her, and the others, many with tear-stained faces, had drifted in

separate ways back to eat their separate dinners. For a few hours

Dinwiddie had been shaken out of its phlegmatic pursuit of happiness;

for a few hours it had attained an emotional solidarity which swept it

up from the innumerable bypaths of the personal to a height where the

personal rises at last into the universal. Then the ebb had come; the

sense of tragedy had lessened slowly with the prolongation of feeling;

and the universal vision had dissolved and crystallized into the

pitiless physical needs of the individual. After the funeral a wave

almost of relief had swept over the town at the thought that the

suspension and the strain were at an end. The business of keeping alive,

and the moral compulsion of keeping abreast of one's neighbours,

reasserted their supremacy even while the carriages, quickening their

pace a trifle on the return drive, rolled out of the churchyard. Now at

the end of a week only Virginia and her mother would take the time from

living to sit down and remember.

In the adjoining room, which was the nursery, Mrs. Pendleton was sitting

beside the window, with her Bible open on her knees, and her head bent a

little in the direction of Miss Priscilla, who was mending a black dress

by the table.

"It is so sweet of you, dear Miss Priscilla," she murmured in her vague

and gentle voice as Virginia entered. So old, so pallid, so fragile she

looked, that she might have been mistaken by a stranger for a woman of

eighty, yet the impossibility of breaking the habit of a lifetime kept

the lines of her face still fixed in an expression of anxious

cheerfulness. For more than forty years she had not thought of herself,

and now that the opportunity had come for her to do so, she found that

she had almost forgotten the way that one went about it. Even grief

could not make her selfish any more than it could make her untidy. Her

manner, like her dress, was so little a matter of impulse, and so

largely a matter of discipline and of conscience, that it expressed her

broken heart hardly more than did the widow's cap on her head or the

mourning brooch that fastened the crape folds of her collar.

"Do you want anything, mother darling? What can I do for you?" asked

Virginia, stooping to kiss her.

"Nothing, dear. I was just telling Miss Priscilla that I had had a visit

from Mr. Treadwell, and that"--her voice quivered a little--"he showed

more feeling than I should have believed possible. He even wanted to

make me an allowance."

Miss Priscilla drew out her large linen handkerchief, which was like a

man's, and loudly blew her nose. "I always said there was more in Cyrus

than people thought," she observed. "Here, I've shortened this dress,

Jinny, until it's just about your mother's length."

She tried to speak carelessly, for though she did not concur in the

popular belief that to ignore sorrow is to assuage it, her social

instinct, which was as strongly developed as Mrs. Pendleton's,

encouraged her to throw a pleasant veil over affliction.

"You're looking pale for want of air, Jinny," she added, after a minute

in which she had thought, "The child has broken so in the last few days

that she looks years older than Oliver."

"I'm trying to make her go driving," said Mrs. Pendleton, leaning

forward over the open page of her Bible.

"But I can't go, mother; I haven't the heart for it," replied Virginia,

choking down a sob.

"I don't like to see you looking so badly, dear. You must keep up your

strength for the children's sake, you know."

"Yes, I know," answered Virginia, but her voice had a weary sound.

A little later, when Miss Priscilla had gone, and Oliver came in to urge

her to go with him, she shook her head again, still palely resolute,

still softly obstinate.

"But, Jinny, it isn't right for you to let your health go," he urged.

"You haven't had a breath of air for days and you're getting sallow."

His own colour was as fine as ever; he grew handsomer, if a trifle

stouter, as he grew older; and at thirty-five there was all the vigour

and the charm of twenty in his face and manner. In one way only he had

altered, and of this alteration, he, as well as Virginia, was beginning

faintly to be aware. Comfort was almost imperceptibly taking the place

of conviction, and the passionate altruism of youth would yield before

many years to the prudential philosophy of middle-age. Life had defeated

him. His best had been thrown back at him, and his nature, embittered by

failure, was adjusting itself gradually to a different and a lower

standard of values. Though he could not be successful, it was still

possible, even within the narrow limits of his income and his

opportunities, to be comfortable. And, like other men who have lived day

by day with heroically unselfish women, he had fallen at last into the

habit of thinking that his being comfortable was, after all, a question

of supreme importance to the universe. Deeply as he had felt the

rector's death, he, in common with the rest of Dinwiddie, was conscious

of breathing more easily after the funeral was over. To his

impressionable nature, alternations of mood were almost an essential of

being, and there was something intolerable to him in any slowly

harrowing grief. To watch Virginia nursing every memory of her father

because she shrank from the subtle disloyalty of forgetfulness, aroused

in him a curious mingling of sympathy and resentment.

"I wish you'd go, even if you don't feel like it--just to please me,

Virginia," he urged, and after a short struggle she yielded to his

altered tone, and got down her hat from the shelf of the wardrobe.

A little later, as the dog-cart rolled out of Dinwiddie into the country

road, she looked through her black grenadine veil on a world which

appeared to have lost its brightness. The road was the one along which

she had ridden on the morning of the fox-hunt; ahead of them lay the

same fields, sown now with the tender green of the spring; the same

creeks ran there, screened by the same thickets of elder; the same pines

wafted their tang on the March wind that blew, singing, out of the

forest. It was all just as it had been on that morning--and yet what a

difference!

"Put up your veil, Virginia--it's enough to smother you."

But she only shook her head, shrinking farther down into the shapeless

borrowed dress as though she felt that it protected her. Following the

habit of people whose choice has been instinctive rather than

deliberate, a choice of the blood, not of the brain, they had long ago

exhausted the fund of conversation with which they had started. There

was nothing to talk about--since Virginia had never learned to talk of

herself, and Oliver had grown reticent recently about the subjects that

interested him. When the daily anecdotes of the children had been aired

between them with an effort at breeziness, nothing remained except the

endless discussion of Harry's education. Even this had worn threadbare

of late, and with the best intentions in the world, Virginia had failed

to supply anything else of sufficient importance to take its place. An

inherited habit, the same habit which had made it possible for Mrs.

Pendleton to efface her broken heart, prompted her to avoid any allusion

to her grief in which she sat shrouded as in her mourning veil.

"The spring is so early this year," she remarked once, with her gaze on

the rosy billows of an orchard. "The peach trees have almost finished

blooming."

Then, as he made no answer except to flick at John Henry's bay mare

with his whip, she asked daringly, "Are you writing again, Oliver?"

A frown darkened his forehead, and she saw the muscles about his mouth

twitch as though he were irritated. For all his failure and his

bitterness, he did not look a day older, she thought, than when she had

first seen him driving down High Street in that unforgettable May. He

was still as ardent, still as capable of inspiring first love in the

imagination of a girl. The light and the perfume of that enchanted

spring seemed suddenly to envelop her, and moved by a yearning to

recapture them for an instant, she drew closer to him, and slipped her

hand through his arm.

"Oh, I'm trying my luck with some trash. Nothing but trash has any

chance of going in this damned business."

"You mean it's different from your others? It's less serious?"

"Less serious? Well, I should say so. It's the sort of ice-cream

soda-water the public wants. But if I can get it put on, it ought to

run, and a play that runs is obliged to make money. I doubt if there's

anything much better than money, when it comes to that."

"You used to say it didn't matter."

"Did I? Well, I was a fool and I've learned better. These last few years

have taught me that nothing else on earth matters much."

This was so different from what that other Oliver--the Oliver of her

first love--might have said, that involuntarily her clasp on his arm

tightened. The change in him, so gradual at first that her mind, unused

to subtleties, had hardly grasped it, was beginning to frighten her.

"You have such burdens, dear," she said, and he noticed that her voice

had acquired the toneless sweetness of her mother's. "I've tried to be

as saving as I could, but the children have been sick so much that it

seems sometimes as if we should never get out of debt. I am trying now

to pay off the bills I was obliged to make while Harry was ill in

October. If I could only get perfectly strong, we might let Marthy go,

now that Jenny is getting so big."

"You work hard enough as it is, Virginia. You've been awfully good about

it," he answered, but his manner was almost casual, for he had grown to

take for granted her unselfishness with something of the unconcern with

which he took for granted the comfortable feeling of the spring weather.

In the early days of their marriage, when her fresh beauty had been a

power to rule him, she had taught him to assume his right to her

self-immolation on the altar of his comfort; and with the taste of

bitterness which sometimes follows the sweets of memory, she recalled

that their first quarrel had arisen because she had insisted on getting

out of bed to make the fires in the morning. Then, partly because the

recollection appeared to reproach him, and partly because, not

possessing the critical faculty, she had never learned to acknowledge

the existence of a flaw in a person she loved, she edged closer to him,

and replied cheerfully:

"I don't mind the work a bit, if only the children will keep well so we

shan't have to spend any more money. I shan't need any black clothes,"

she added, with a trembling lip. "Mrs. Carrington has given me this

dress, as she has gone out of mourning, and I've got a piece of blue

silk put away that I am going to have dyed."

He glanced at the shapeless dress, not indignantly as he would once have

done, but with a tinge of quiet amusement.

"It makes you look every day of forty."

"I know it isn't becoming, but at least it will save having to buy one."

In spite of the fact that her small economies had made it possible for

them to live wholesomely, and with at least an appearance of decency, on

his meagre salary, they had always aroused in him a sense of bitter

exasperation. He respected her, of course, for her saving, yet in his

heart he knew that she would probably have charmed him more had she been

a spendthrift--since the little virtues are sometimes more deadly to the

passion of love than are the large vices. While he nodded, without

disputing the sound common sense in her words, she thought a little

wistfully how nice it would be to have pretty things if only one could

afford them. Someday, when the children's schooling was over and Oliver

had got a larger salary, she would begin to buy clothes that were

becoming rather than durable. But that was in the future, and,

meanwhile, how much better it was to grudge every penny she spent on

herself as long as there were unpaid bills at the doctor's and the

grocer's. All of which was, of course, perfectly reasonable, and like

other women who have had a narrow experience of life, she cherished the

delusion that a man's love, as well as his philosophy, is necessarily

rooted in reason.

When they turned homeward, the bay mare, pricked by desire for her

stable, began to travel more rapidly, and the fall of her hoofs,

accompanied by the light roll of the wheels, broke the silence which had

almost imperceptibly settled upon them. Not until the cart drew up at

the gate did Virginia realize that they had hardly spoken a dozen words

on the drive back.

"I feel better already, Oliver," she said, gratefully, as he helped her

to alight. Then hastening ahead of him, she ran up the walk and into the

hall, where her mother, looking wan and unnatural in her widow's cap,

greeted her with the question:

"Did you have a pleasant drive, dear?"

* * * * *

For six months Mrs. Pendleton hid her broken heart under a smile and

went softly about the small daily duties of the household, facing death,

as she had faced life, with a sublime unselfishness and the manner of a

lady. Her hopes, her joys, her fears even, lay in the past; there was

nothing for her to look forward to, nothing for her to dread in the

future. Life had given her all that it had to offer of bliss or sorrow,

and for the rest of her few years she would be like one who, having

finished her work before the end of the day, sits waiting patiently for

the words of release to be spoken. As the months went on, she moved like

a gentle shadow about her daughter's little home. So wasted and pallid

was her body that at times Virginia feared to touch her lest she should

melt like a phantom out of her arms. Yet to the last she never faltered,

never cried out for mercy, never sought to hasten by a breath that end

which was to her as the longing of her eyes, as the brightness of the

sunlight, as the sweetness of the springtime. Once, looking up from

Lucy's lesson which she was hearing, she said a little wistfully, "I

don't think, Jinny, it will be long now," and then checking herself

reproachfully, she added, "But God knows best. I can trust Him."

It was the only time that she had ever spoken of the thought which was

in her mind day and night, for when she could no longer welcome her

destiny, she had accepted it. Her faith, like her opinions, was

child-like and uncritical--the artless product of a simple and incurious

age. The strength in her had gone not into the building of knowledge,

but into the making of character, and she had judged all thought as

innocently as she had judged all literature, by its contribution to the

external sweetness of living. A child of ten might have demolished her

theories, and yet because of them, or in spite of them, she had

translated into action the end of all reasoning, the profoundest meaning

in all philosophy. But she was born to decorate instead of to reason.

Though her mind had never winnowed illusions from realities, her hands

had patiently woven both illusions and realities into the embroidered

fabric of Life.

For six months she went about the house and helped Virginia with the

sewing, which had become burdensome since the children, and especially

Harry, were big enough to wear daily holes in their stockings. Then,

when the half year was over, she took to her bed one evening after she

had carefully undressed, folded her clothes out of sight, and read a

chapter in her Bible. In the morning she did not get up, and at the end

of a fortnight, in which she apologized for making extra work whenever

food was brought to her, she clasped her hands on her thin breast,

smiled once into Virginia's face, and died so quietly that there was

hardly a perceptible change in her breathing. She had gone through life

without giving trouble, and she gave none at the end. As she lay there

in her little bed in Virginia's spare room, to which she had moved after

Gabriel's death in order that the rectory might be got ready for the new

rector, she appeared so shadowy and unearthly that it was impossible to

believe that she had ever been a part of the restless strivings and the

sombre violences of life. On the candle-stand by her bed lay her

spectacles, with steel rims because she had never felt that she could

afford gold ones; and a single October rose, from which a golden petal

had dropped, stood in a vase beside the Bible. On the foot of the bed

hung her grey flannelette wrapper, with a patch in one sleeve over which

Harry had spilled a bottle of shoe polish, while through the

half-shuttered window the autumn sunshine fell in long yellow bars over

the hemp rugs on the floor. And she was dead! Her mother was dead--no

matter how much she needed her, she would never come back. Out of the

vacancy around her, some words of her own, spoken in her girlhood,

returned to her. "There is only one thing I couldn't bear, and that is

losing my mother." Only one thing! And now that one thing had happened,

and she was not only bearing it, she was looking ahead to a future in

which that one thing would be always beside her, always in her memory.

Whatever the years brought to her, they could never bring her mother

again--they could never bring her a love like her mother's.

Out of that same vacancy, which seemed to swallow and to hold

everything, which seemed to exist both within and outside of herself, a

multitude of forgotten images and impressions flashed into being. She

saw the nursery fireside in the rectory, and her mother, with hair that

still shone like satin, rocking back and forth in the black wicker chair

with the sagging bottom. She saw her kneeling on the old frayed red and

blue drugget, her skirt pinned up at the back of her waist, while she

bathed her daughter's scratched and aching feet in the oblong tin

foot-tub. She saw her, as beautiful as an angel, in church on Sunday

mornings, her worshipful eyes lifted to the pulpit, an edge of

tinted light falling on the open prayer-book in her hand. She saw

her, thin and stooping, a shadow of all that she had once

been--waiting--waiting----She had always been there. It was impossible

to realize that a time could ever come when she would not be there--and

now she was gone!

And behind all the images, all the impressions, the stubborn thought

persisted that this was life--that one could never escape it--that

whatever happened, one must come back to it at the last. "I have my

children still left--but for my children I could not live!" she thought,

dropping on her knees by the bedside, and hiding her face in the grey

wrapper.

* * * * *

After this it seemed to her that she ceased to live except in the lives

of her children, and her days passed so evenly, so monotonously, that

she only noticed their flight when one of the old people in Dinwiddie

remarked to her with a certain surprise: "You've almost a grown

daughter now, Jinny," or "Harry will soon be getting as big as his

father. Have you decided where you will send him to college?" She was

not unhappy--had she ever stopped to ask herself the question, she would

probably have answered, "If only mother and father were living, I should

be perfectly satisfied"; yet in spite of her assurances, there existed

deep down in her--so deep that her consciousness had never fully grasped

the fact of its presence--a dumb feeling that something was missing out

of life, that the actuality was a little less bright, a little less

perfect than it had appeared through the rosy glamour of her virgin

dreams. Was this "something missing" merely one of the necessary

conditions of mortal existence? Or was there somewhere on the earth that

stainless happiness which she had once believed her marriage would bring

to her? "I should be perfectly satisfied if only----" she would

sometimes say in the night, and then check herself before she had ended

the sentence. The lack, real as it was, was still too formless to lend

itself to the precision of words; it belonged less to circumstances than

to the essential structure of life. And yet, as she put it to herself in

her rare moments of depression, she had so much to be thankful for! The

children grew stronger as they grew older--since Harry's attack of

diphtheria, indeed, there had been no serious illness in the family, and

as she approached middle-age, her terror of illness increased rather

than diminished. The children made up for much--they ought to have made

up for everything--and yet did they? There was no visible fault that she

could attribute to them. With her temperamental inability to see flaws,

she was accustomed to think of them as perfect children, as children

whom she would not change, had she the power, by so much as a hair or an

outline. They grew up, straight, fine, and fearless, full of the new

spirit, eager to test life, to examine facts, possessed by that

awakening feeling for truth which had always frightened her a little in

Susan. Vaguely, without defining the sensation, she felt that they were

growing beyond her, that she could no longer keep up with them, that,

every year, they were leaving her a little farther behind them. They

were fond of her, but she understood from something Jenny said one day,

that they had ceased to be proud of her. It was while they were looking

over an old photograph album of Susan's that, coming to a picture of

Virginia, taken the week before her wedding, Jenny cried out: "Why,

there's mother!" and slipped it out of the page.

"I never saw that before," Lucy said, leaning over with a laugh. "You

were so young when you married, mother, and you wore such tight sleeves,

and a bustle!"

"Would you ever have believed she was as pretty as that?" asked Jenny,

with the unconscious brutality of childhood.

"If you are ever as beautiful as your mother was, you may thank your

stars," said Susan dryly, and by the expression in her face Virginia

knew that she was thinking, "If that was my child, I'd slap her!"

Harry, who had been stuffing fruitcake on the sofa--sweets were his

weakness--rose suddenly and came over to the group.

"If you are ever as beautiful as she is now, you may thank your stars,

Miss Yellow Frisk!" he remarked crushingly.

It was a little thing--so little that it seemed ridiculous to think of

it as among the momentous happenings in a life--but with that

extraordinary proneness of the little to usurp the significant places of

memory, it had become at last one of the important milestones in her

experience. At the end, when she forgot everything else, she would not

forget Harry's foolish words, nor the look in his indignant boyish face

when he uttered them. Until then she had not admitted to herself that

there was a difference in her feeling for her children, but with the

touch of his sympathetic, not over clean, hand on her shoulder, she knew

that she should never again think of the three of them as if they were

one in her interest and her love. The girls were good children, dear

children--she would have let herself be cut in pieces for either of them

had it been necessary--but between Harry and herself there was a

different bond, a closer and a deeper dependency, which strengthened

almost insensibly as he grew older. Her daughters she loved, but her

son, as is the inexplicable way of women, she adored blindly and without

wisdom. If it had been possible to ruin him, she would have done so,

but, unlike many other sons, he seemed, by virtue of that invincible

strength with which he had been born, to be proof against both spoiling

and flattery. He was a nice boy even to strangers, even to Susan, with

her serene judgment of persons, he appeared a thoroughly nice boy! He

was not only a tall, lean, habitually towselled-headed youngster, with a

handsome sunburned face and a pair of charming, slightly quizzical blue

eyes, but he was, as his teachers and his school reports bore witness,

possessed of an intellectual brilliancy which made study as easy, and

quite as interesting to him, as play. Unlike his father, he had entered

life endowed with a cheerful outlook upon the world and with that

temperament of success which usually, but by no means inevitably,

accompanies it. Whatever happened, he would make the best of it, he

would "get on," and it was impossible to imagine him in any hole so deep

that he could not, sooner or later, find the way out of it. The

Pendleton and the Treadwell spirits had contributed their best to him.

If he derived from Cyrus, or from some obscure strain in Cyrus's

ancestry, a wholesome regard for material success, a robust

determination to achieve results combined with that hard, clear vision

of affairs which makes such achievement easy, he had inherited from

Gabriel his genial temper, his charm of manner, and his faith in life,

which, though it failed to move mountains, had sweetened and enriched

the mere act of living. Though he was less demonstrative than Lucy, who

had outgrown the plainness and the reticence of her childhood and was

developing into a coquettish, shallow-minded girl, with what Miss

Priscilla called "a glib tongue," Virginia learned gradually, in the

secret way mothers learn things, that his love for her was, after his

ambition, the strongest force in his character. Between him and his

father there had existed ever since his babyhood a curious, silent, yet

ineradicable hostility. Whether the fault was Oliver's or Harry's,

whether the father resented the energy and the initiative of his son, or

the son resented the indifference and the self-absorption of his father,

Virginia had never discovered. For years she fought against admitting

the discord between them. Then, at last, on the occasion of a quarrel,

when it was no longer possible to dissemble, she followed Oliver into

his study, which had once been the "back parlour," and pleaded with him

to show a little patience, a little sympathy with his son. "He's a boy

any father would be proud of----" she finished, almost in tears.

"I know he is," he answered irritably, "but the truth is he rubs me the

wrong way. I suppose the trouble is that you have spoiled him."

"But he isn't spoiled. Everybody says----"

"Oh, everybody!" he murmured disdainfully, with a shrug of his fine

shoulders.

He looked back at her with the sombre fire of anger still in his eyes,

and she saw, without trying to see, without even knowing that she did

see, all the changes that years had wrought in his appearance.

Physically, he was a finer animal than he had been when she married him,

for time, which had sapped her youth and faded her too delicate bloom,

had but added a deeper colour to the warm brown of his skin, a steadier

glow to his eyes, a more silvery gloss to his hair. At forty, he was a

handsomer man than he had been at twenty-five, yet, in spite of this,

some virtue had gone out of him--here, too, as in life, "something was

missing." The generous impulses, the high heart for adventure, the

enthusiasm of youth, and youth's white rage for perfection--where were

these? It was as if a rough hand had passed over him, coarsening here,

blotting out there, accentuating elsewhere. The slow, insidious devil of

compromise had done its work. Once he had made one of the small band of

fighters who fight not for advantage, but for the truth; now he stood in

that middle place with the safe majority who are "neither for God nor

for His enemies." Life had done this to him--life and Virginia. It was

not only that he had "grown soft," as he would have expressed it, nor

was it even wholly that he had grown selfish, for the canker which ate

at the roots of his personality had affected not his character merely,

but the very force of his will. Though the imperative he obeyed had

always been not "I must," but "I want," his natural loftiness of purpose

might have saved him from the results of his weakness had he not lost

gradually the capacity for successful resistance with which he had

started. If only in the beginning she had upheld not his inclinations,

but his convictions; if only she had sought not to soothe his weakness,

but to stimulate his strength; if only she had seen for once the thing

as it was, not as it ought to have been----

He was buried in his work now, and there were months during this year

when she appeared hardly to see him, so engrossed, so self-absorbed had

he become. Sometimes she would remember, stifling the pang it caused,

the nights when he had written his first plays in Matoaca City, and that

he had made her sit beside him with her sewing because he could not

think if she were out of the room. Now, he could write only when he was

alone; he hated an interruption so much that she often let the fire go

out rather than open his closed door to see if it was burning. If she

went in to speak to him, he laid his pen down and did not take it up

again while she was there. Yet this change had come so stealthily that

it had hardly affected her happiness. She had grown accustomed to the

difference before she had realized it sufficiently to suffer. Sometimes

she would say to herself a little wonderingly, "Oliver used to be so

romantic;" for with the majority of women whose marriages have

surrendered to an invasion of the commonplace, she accepted the

comfortable theory that the alteration was due less to circumstances

than to the natural drying of the springs of sentiment in her husband's

character. Occasionally, she would remember with a smile her three days'

jealousy of Abby; but the brevity and the folly of this had established

her the more securely in her impregnable position of unquestioning

belief in him. She had started life believing, as the women of her race

had believed for ages before her, that love was a divine gift which came

but once in a lifetime, and which, coming once, remained forever

indestructible. People, of course, grew more practical and less intense

as they left youth farther behind them; and though this misty principle

would have dissolved at once had she applied it to herself (for she

became more sentimental as she approached middle-age), behind any

suspicious haziness of generalization there remained always the sacred

formula, "Men are different." Once, when a sharp outbreak of the primal

force had precipitated a scandal in the home of one of her neighbours,

she had remarked to Susan that she was "devoutly thankful that Oliver

did not have that side to his nature."

"It must be a disagreeable side to live with," Susan, happily married to

John Henry, and blissfully expectant of motherhood, had replied, "but as

far as I know, Oliver never had a light fancy for a woman in his

life--not even before he was married. I used to tell him that it was

because he expected too much. Physical beauty by itself never seemed to

attract him--it was the angel in you that he first fell in love with."

A glow of pleasure flushed Virginia's sharpened features, mounting to

the thin little curls on her forehead. These little curls, to which she

sentimentally clung in spite of the changes in the fashions, were a

cause of ceaseless worry to Lucy, who had developed into a "stylish"

girl, and would have died sooner than she would have rejected the

universal pompadour of the period. It was the single vanity that

Virginia had ever permitted herself, this adhering at middle-age to the

quaint and rather coquettish hairdressing of her girlhood: and Fate had

punished her by threading the little curls with grey, while Susan's

stiff roll (she had adopted the newer mode) remained bravely flaxen. But

Susan was one of those women who, lacking a fine fair skin and defying

tradition, are physically at their best between forty and fifty.

"Oliver used to be so romantic," said Virginia, as she had said so often

to herself, while the glow paled slowly from her cheeks, leaving them

the colour of faded rose-leaves.

"Not so romantic as you were, Jinny."

"Oh, I am still," she laughed softly. "Lucy says I take more interest in

her lovers now than she does," and she added after a minute, "Girls are

so different to-day from what they used to be--they are so much less

sentimental."

"But I thought Lucy was. She has enough flirtations for her age, hasn't

she?"

"She has enough attention, of course--for the funny part is that, though

she's only sixteen and not nearly so pretty as Jenny, the men are all

crazy, as Miss Willy says, about her. But, somehow, it's different. Lucy

enjoys it, but it isn't her life. As for Jenny, she's still too young to

have taken shape, I suppose, but she has only one idea in her head and

that is going to college. She never gives a boy a thought."

"That's queer, because she promises already to be the most beautiful

girl in Dinwiddie."

"She is beautiful. I am quite sure that it isn't because she is my

daughter that I think so. But, all the same, I'm afraid she'll never be

as popular as Lucy is. She is so distant and overbearing to men that

they are shy of her."

"And you'll let her go to college?"

"If we can afford it--and now that Oliver hopes to get one of his plays

put on, we may have a little more money. But it seems such a waste to

me. I never saw that it could possibly do a woman any good to go to

college--though of course I always sympathized with your disappointment,

dear Susan. Jenny is bent on it now, but I feel so strongly that it

would be better for her to come out in Dinwiddie and go to parties and

have attention."

"And does Oliver feel that, too?"

"Oh, he doesn't care. Jenny is his favourite, and he will let her do

anything he thinks she has set her heart on. But he has never put his

whole life into the children's as I have done."

"But if she goes, will you be able to send Harry?"

"Of course, Harry's education must come before everything else--even

Oliver realizes that. Do you know, I've hardly bought a match for ten

years that I haven't stopped to ask myself if it would take anything

from Harry's education. That's why I've gone as shabby as this almost

ever since he was born--that and my longing to give the girls a few

pretty things."

"You haven't bought a dress for yourself since I can remember. I should

think you would wear your clothes out making them over."

The look in Virginia's face showed that the recollection Susan had

invoked was not entirely a pleasant one.

"I've done with as little as I could," she answered. "Only once was I

really extravagant, and that was when I bought a light blue silk which I

didn't have made up until years afterwards when it was dyed black. Dyed

things never hold their own," she concluded pensively.

"You are too unselfish--that is your only fault," said Susan

impulsively. "I hope they appreciate all you have been to them."

"Oh, they appreciate me," returned Virginia with a laugh. "Harry does,

anyhow."

"I believe Harry is your darling, Jinny."

"I try not to make any difference in my feeling--they are all the best

children that ever lived--but--Susan, I wouldn't breathe this to anybody

on earth but you--I can't help thinking that Harry loves me more than

the others do. He--he has so much more patience with me. The girls

sometimes laugh at me because I am old-fashioned and behind the times,

and I can see that it annoys them because I am ignorant of things which

they seem to have been born knowing."

"But it was for their sake that you let yourself go--you gave up

everything else for them from the minute that they were born."

A tear shone in Virginia's eye, and Susan knew, without having it put

into words, that a wound somewhere in that gentle heart was still

hurting. "I'd like to slap them!" she thought fiercely, and then she

said aloud with a manner of cheerful conviction:

"You are a great deal too good for them, Jinny, and some day they will

know it."

A longing came over her to take the thin little figure in her arms and

shake back into her something of the sparkle and the radiance of her

girlhood. Why did beauty fade? Why did youth grow middle-aged? Above

all, why did love and sacrifice so often work their own punishment?

CHAPTER II

THE PRICE OF COMFORT

Virginia knelt on the cushioned seat in the bay-window of her bedroom,

gazing expectantly down on the pavement below. It was her forty-fifth

birthday, and she was impatiently waiting for Harry, who was coming home

for a few days before going abroad to finish his studies at Oxford. The

house was a new, impeccably modern dwelling, produced by a triumph of

the utilitarian genius of the first decade of the twentieth century, and

Oliver had bought it at a prodigious price a few years after his

dramatic success had lifted him from poverty into comfort. The girls,

charmed to have made the momentous passage into Sycamore Street, were

delighted with the space and elegance of their new home, but Virginia

had always felt somehow as if she were visiting. The drawing-room, and

especially the butler's pantry, awed her. She had not dared to wash

those august shelves with soda, nor to fasten her favourite strips of

white oilcloth along their shining surfaces. The old joy of "fixing up"

her storeroom had been wrested from her by the supercilious mulatto

butler, who wore immaculate shirt fronts, but whom she suspected of

being untidy beneath his magnificent exterior. Once when she had

discovered a bucket of apple-parings tucked away under the sink, where

it had stood for days, he had given "notice" so unexpectedly and so

haughtily that she had been afraid ever since to look under dish-towels

or into hidden places while he was absent. Out of the problem of the

South "the servant question" had arisen to torment and intimidate the

housekeepers of Dinwiddie; and inferior service at high wages was

regarded of late as a thing for which one had come to be thankful. Had

they still lived in the little house, Virginia would gladly have done

her work for the sake of the peace and the cleanliness which it would

have ensured; but since the change in their circumstances, Oliver and

the girls had grown so dependent upon the small luxuries of living that

she put up with anything--even with the appalling suspicion that every

mouthful she ate was not clean--rather than take the risk of having her

three servants desert in a body. When she had unwisely complained to

Oliver, he had remarked impatiently that he couldn't be bothered about

the housekeeping, and Lucy had openly accused her of being "fussy."

After this she had said nothing more, but gathering suddenly all her

energies, she had precipitated a scene with the servants (which ended to

her relief in the departure of the magnificent butler) and had

reorganized at a stroke the affairs of her household. For all her

gentleness, she was not incapable of decisive action, and though it had

always been easier for her to work herself than to direct others, her

native talent for domesticity had enabled her to emerge triumphantly out

of this crisis. Now, on her forty-fifth birthday, she could reflect with

pride (the pride of a woman who has mastered her traditional _métier de

femme_) that there was not a house in Dinwiddie which had better food

or smoother service than she provided in hers. For more and more, as

Oliver absorbed himself in his work, which kept him in New York many

months of the year, and the children grew so big that they no longer

needed her, did her life centre around the small monotonous details of

cooking and cleaning. Only when, as occasionally happened, the rest of

the family were absent together, Oliver about his plays, Lucy on a visit

to Richmond, and Harry and Jenny at college, an awful sense of futility

descended upon her, and she felt that both the purpose and the

initiative were sapped from her character. Sometimes, during such days

or weeks of loneliness, she would think of her mother's words, uttered

so often in the old years at the rectory: "There isn't any pleasure in

making things unless there's somebody to make them for."

Beyond the window, the November day, which had been one of placid

contentment for her, was slowly drawing to its close. The pale red line

of an autumn sunset lingered in the west above the huddled roofs of the

town, while the mournful dusk of evening was creeping up from the earth.

A few chilled and silent sparrows hopped dejectedly along the bared

boughs of the young maple tree in front of the house, and every now and

then a brisk pedestrian would pass on the concrete pavement below.

Inside, a cheerful fire burned in the grate, and near it, on one end of

the chintz-covered couch, lay Oliver's present to her--a set of black

bear furs, which he had brought down with him from New York. Turning

away from the window, she slipped the neck-piece over her shoulders, and

as she did so, she tried to stifle the wonder whether he would have

bought them--whether even he would have remembered the date--if Harry

had not been with him. Last year he had forgotten her birthday--and

never before had he given her so costly a present as this. They were

beautiful furs, but even she, with her ignorance of the subtler arts of

dress, saw that they were too heavy for her, that they made her look

shrunken and small and accentuated the pallor of her skin, which had the

colour and the texture of withered rose-leaves. "They are just what

Jenny has always wanted, and they would be so becoming to her. I wonder

if Oliver would mind my letting her take them back to Bryn Mawr after

the holidays?"

If Oliver would mind! The phrase still remained after the spirit which

sanctified it had long departed. In her heart she knew--though her

happiness rested upon her passionate evasion of the knowledge--that

Oliver had not only ceased to mind, that he had even ceased to notice

whether she wore his gifts or gave them to Jenny.

A light step flitted along the hall; her door opened without shutting

again, and Lucy, in a street gown made in the princess style, hurried

across the room and turned a slender back appealingly towards her.

"Oh, mother, please unhook me as fast as you can. The Peytons are going

to take me in their car over to Richmond, and I've only a half hour in

which to get ready."

Then, as Virginia's hands fumbled a little at an obstinate hook, Lucy

gave an impatient pull of her shoulders, and reached back, straining her

arms, until she tore the offending fastenings from her dress. She was a

small, graceful girl, not particularly pretty, not particularly clever,

but possessing some indefinable quality which served her as

successfully as either beauty or cleverness could have done. Though she

was the most selfish and the least considerate of the three children,

Virginia was like wax in her hands, and regarded her dashing, rather

cynical, worldliness with naïve and uncomprehending respect. She

secretly disapproved of Lucy, but it was a disapproval which was

tempered by admiration. It seemed miraculous to her that any girl of

twenty-two should possess so clearly formulated and critical a

philosophy of life, or should be so utterly emancipated from the last

shackles of reverence. As far as her mother could discern, Lucy

respected but a single thing, and that single thing was her own opinion.

For authority she had as little reverence as a savage; yet she was not a

savage, for she represented instead the perfect product of

over-civilization. The world was bounded for her by her own personality.

She was supremely interested in what she thought, felt, or imagined, and

beyond the limits of her individuality, she was frankly bored by

existence. The joys, sorrows, or experiences of others failed even to

arrest her attention. Yet the very simplicity and sincerity of her

egoism robbed it of offensiveness, and raised it from a trait of

character to the dignity of a point of view. The established law of

self-sacrifice which had guided her mother's life was not only

personally distasteful to her--it was morally indefensible. She was

engaged not in illustrating precepts of conduct, but in realizing her

independence; and this realization of herself appeared to her as the

supreme and peculiar obligation of her being. Though she was less fine

than Jenny, who in her studious way was a girl of much character, she

was by no means as superficial as she appeared, and might in time,

aided by fortuitous circumstances, make a strong and capable woman. Her

faults, after all, were due in a large measure to a training which had

consistently magnified in her mind the space which she would ultimately

occupy in the universe.

And she had charm. Without beauty, without intellect, without culture,

she was still able to dominate her surroundings by her inexplicable but

undeniable charm. She was one of those women of whom people say, "It is

impossible to tell what attracts men in a woman." She was indifferent,

she was casual, she was even cruel; yet every male creature she met fell

a victim before her. Her slightest gesture had a fascination for the

masculine mind; her silliest words a significance. "I declare men are

the biggest fools where women are concerned," Miss Priscilla had

remarked, watching her; and the words had adequately expressed the

opinion of the feminine half of Dinwiddie's population.

From sixteen to twenty-two she had remained as indifferent as a star to

the impassioned moths flitting around her. Then, a month after her

twenty-second birthday, she had coolly announced her engagement to a man

whom she had seen but six times--a widower at that, twelve years older

than herself, and the father of two children. The blow had fallen,

without warning, upon Virginia, who had never seen the man, and did not

like what she had heard of him. Unwisely, she had attempted to

remonstrate, and had been met by the reply, "Mother, dear, you must

allow me to decide what is for my happiness," and a manner which said,

"After all, you know so much less of life than I do, how can you advise

me?"

It was intolerable, of course, and the worst of it was that, rebel as

she might against the admission, Virginia could not plausibly deny the

truth of either the remark or the manner. On the face of it, Lucy must

know best what she wanted, and as for knowledge of life, she was

certainly justified in considering her mother a child beside her.

Oliver, when the case was put before him, showed a sympathy with

Virginia's point of view and a moral inability to coerce his daughter

into accepting it. "She knows I never liked Craven," he said, "but after

all what are we going to do about it? She's old enough to decide for

herself, and you can't in this century put a girl on bread and water

because she marries as she chooses."

Nothing about duty! nothing about consideration for her family! nothing

about the awful responsibility of entering lightly into such sacred

relations! Lucy was evidently in love--if she hadn't been, why on earth

should she have precipitated herself into an affair whose only reason

was a lack of reason that was conclusive?--but she might have been

engaging a chauffeur for all the solemnity she put into the

arrangements. She had selected her clothes and planned her wedding with

a practical wisdom which had awed and saddened her mother. All the

wistful sentiments, the tender evasions, the consecrated dreams that had

gone into the preparations for Virginia's marriage, were buried

somewhere under the fragrant past of the eighties--and the memory of

them made her feel not forty-five, but a hundred. Yet the thing that

troubled her most was a feeling that she was in the power of forces

which she did not understand--a sense that there were profound

disturbances beneath the familiar surface of life.

When Lucy had gone out, with her dress open down the back and a glimpse

of her smooth girlish shoulders showing between the fastenings, Virginia

went over to the window again, and was rewarded by the sight of Harry's

athletic figure crossing the street.

In a minute he came in, kissing her with the careless tenderness which

was one of her secret joys.

"Halloo! little mother! All alone? Where are the others?" He was the

only one of her children who appeared to enjoy her, and sometimes when

they were alone together, he would turn and put his arms about her, or

stroke her hands with an impulsive, protecting sympathy. There were

moments when it seemed to her that he pitied her because the world had

moved on without her; and others when he came to her for counsel about

things of which she was not only ignorant, but even a little afraid.

Once he had consulted her as to whether he should go on the football

team at his college, and had listened respectfully enough to her timid

objections. Respect, indeed, was the quality in which he had never

failed her, and this, even more than his affection, had become a balm to

her in recent years, when Lucy and Jenny occasionally lost patience and

showed themselves openly amused by her old-fashioned opinions. She had

never forgotten that he had once taken her part when the girls had tried

to persuade her to brush back the little curls from her temples and wear

her hair in a pompadour.

"It would look so much more suitable for a woman of your age, mother

dear," Lucy had remarked sweetly with a condescending deference which

had made Virginia feel as if she were a thousand.

"And it would be more becoming, too, now that your hair is turning

grey," Jenny had added, with an intention to be kind and helpful which

had gone wrong somehow and turned into officiousness.

"Shut up, and don't be silly geese," Harry had growled at them, and his

rudeness in her behalf had given Virginia a delicious thrill, which was

increased by the knowledge that his manners were usually excellent even

to his sisters. "You let them fuss all they want to, mother," he

concluded, "but your hair is a long sight better than theirs, and don't

you let them nag you into making a mess of it."

All of which had been sweet beyond words to Virginia, though she was

obliged to admit that his judgment was founded upon a deplorable lack of

discrimination in the matter of hairdressing--since Lucy and Jenny both

had magnificent hair, while her own had long since lost its gloss and

grown thin from neglect. But if it had been really the truth, it could

not have been half so sweet to her.

"Lucy is dressing to motor over to Richmond with the Peytons, and your

father went out to ride. Harry, why won't you let me go on to New York

to see you off?"

He was sailing the following week for England, and he had forbidden her

to come to his boat, or even to New York, for a last glimpse of him.

"Oh, I hate having a scene at the boat, mother. It always makes me feel

creepy to say good-bye. I never do it if I can help."

"I know you don't, darling--you sneaked off after the holidays without

telling me what train you were going by. But this is for such a long

time. Two years, Harry."

Her voice broke, and turning away, she gazed through the window at the

young maple tree as though her very soul were concentrated upon the

leafless boughs.

He stirred uneasily, for like most men of twenty-one, he had a horror of

sentiment.

"Oh, well, you may come over next summer, you know. I'll speak to father

about it. If his play goes over to London, he'll have to be there, won't

he?"

"I suppose so," she replied, choking down her tears, and becoming

suddenly cheerful. "And you'll write to me once a week, Harry?"

"You bet! By the way, I've had nothing to eat since ten o'clock, and I

feel rather gone. Have you some cake around anywhere?"

"But we'll have supper in half an hour, and I've ordered waffles and

fried chicken for you. Hadn't you better wait?"

Her cheerfulness was not assumed now, for with the turn to practical

matters, she felt suddenly that the universe had righted itself. Even

Harry's departure was forgotten in the immediate necessity of providing

for his appetite.

"Well, I'll wait, but I hope you've prepared for an army. I could eat a

hundred waffles."

He snapped his jaws, and she laughed delightedly. For all his twenty-one

years, and the scholarship which he had won so easily and which was

taking him abroad, he was as boyish and as natural as he had been at

ten. Even his love of sweets had not lessened with the increase of his

dignity. To think of his demanding cake the minute after he had entered

the house!

"Father's play made a great hit," he said presently, still steering

carefully away from the reefs of emotion. "I suppose you read all about

it in the papers?"

She shook her head, smiling. Though she tried her best to be as natural

and as unemotional as he was, she could not keep her adoration out of

her eyes, which feasted on him like the eyes of one who had starved for

months. How handsome he was, with his broad shoulders, his fine

sunburned face, and his frank, boyish smile. It was a pity he had to

wear glasses--yet even his glasses seemed to her individual and

charming. She couldn't imagine a single way in which he could be

improved, and all the while she was perfectly sure that it wasn't in the

least because she was his mother--that she wasn't a bit prejudiced in

her judgment. It appeared out of the question that anybody--even a

stranger--could have found fault with him. "No, I haven't had time to

read the papers--I've been so busy getting ready for Lucy's wedding,"

she answered. "But your father told me about it. It must be

splendid--only I wish he wouldn't speak so contemptuously of it," she

added regretfully. "He says it's trash, and yet I'm sure everybody spoke

well of it, and they say it is obliged to make a great deal of money. I

can't understand why his success seems to irritate rather than please

him."

"Well, he thinks, you know, that it is only since he's cheapened himself

that he has had any hearing."

"Cheapened himself?" she repeated wistfully. "But his first plays failed

entirely, so these last ones must be a great deal better if they are

such splendid successes."

"Well, I suppose it's hard for us to understand his point of view. We

talked about it one night in New York when we were dining with Margaret

Oldcastle--she takes the leading part in 'Pretty Fanny,' you know."

"Yes, I know. What is she like?"

A strange, still look came into her face, as though she waited with

suspended breath for his answer.

"She's a charmer on the stage. I heard father tell her that she made the

play, and I'm not sure that he wasn't right."

"But you saw her off the stage, didn't you?"

"Oh, yes, she asked me to dinner. She didn't look nearly so young, then,

and she's not exactly pretty; but, somehow, it didn't seem to matter.

She's got genius--you couldn't be with her ten minutes without finding

out that. I never saw any one in my life so much alive. When she's in a

room, even if she doesn't speak, you can't keep your eyes off her. She's

like a bright flame that you can't stop looking at--not even if there

are a lot of prettier women there, too."

"Is she dark or fair?"

He stopped to think for a moment.

"To save my life I can't remember--but I think she's dark--at least, her

eyes are, though her hair may be light. But you never think of her

appearance when she's talking. I believe she's the best talker I ever

heard--better even than father."

His enthusiasm had got the better of him, and it was evident that

Oliver's success had banished for a time at least the secret hostility

which had existed between father and son. That passion for material

results, which could not be separated from the Treadwell spirit without

robbing that spirit of its vitality, had gradually altered the family

attitude toward Oliver's profession. Art, like business, must justify

itself by its results, and to a commercial age there could be no

justifiable results that could not bear translation into figures.

Success was the chief end of man, and success could be measured only in

terms of money.

"There's your father's step," said Virginia, whose face looked drawn and

pallid in the dusk. "Let me light the lamp, darling. He hates to read

his paper by anything but lamplight."

But he had jumped up before she had finished and was hunting for matches

in the old place under the clock on the mantelpiece. She was such a

little, thin, frail creature that he laughed as she tried to help him.

"So Lucy is going to marry that old rotter, is she?" he asked pleasantly

as his father entered. "Well, father! I was just asking mother why she

let Lucy marry that old rotter?"

"But the dear child has set her heart on him, and he is really very nice

to us," replied Virginia hurriedly. Though she was disappointed in

Lucy's choice, it seemed dreadful to her to speak of a man who was about

to enter the family as a "rotter."

"You stop it, Harry, if you have the authority. I haven't," answered

Oliver carelessly. "Is your neuralgia better, Virginia?"

"It's quite gone, dear. Doctor Powell gave me some aspirin and it cured

it." She smiled gratefully at him, with a touching pleasure in the fact

that he had remembered to ask. As she glanced quickly from father to

son, eager to see them reconciled, utterly forgetful of herself,

something of the anxious cheerfulness of Mrs. Pendleton's spirit

appeared to live again in her look. Though her freshness had withered,

she was still what is called "a sweet looking woman," and her

expression of simple goodness lent an appealing charm to her features.

"Are you going back to New York soon, father?" asked Harry, turning

politely in Oliver's direction. From his manner, which had lost its

boyishness, Virginia knew that he was trying with all his energy to be

agreeable, yet that he could not overcome the old feeling of constraint

and lack of sympathy.

"Next week. 'The Home' is to be put on in February, and I'm obliged to

be there for the rehearsals."

"Does Miss Oldcastle take the leading part?"

"Yes."

Crossing the room, Oliver held out his hands to the fire, and then

turning, stretched his arms, with a stifled yawn, above his head. The

only fault that could be urged against his appearance was that his

figure was becoming a trifle square, that he was beginning to look a

little too well-fed, a little too comfortable. For the rest, his hair,

which had gone quite grey, brought out the glow and richness of his

colour and lent a striking emphasis to his dark, shining eyes.

"Do you think that the new play is as good as 'Pretty Fanny'?" asked

Virginia.

"Well, they're both rot, you know," he answered, with a laugh.

"Oh, Oliver, how can you, when all the papers spoke so admiringly of

it?"

"Why shouldn't they? It is perfectly innocuous. The kind of thing any

father might take his daughter to see. We shan't dispute that, anyhow."

His flippancy not only hurt, it confused her. It was painful enough to

have him speak so slightingly of his success, but worse than this was

the feeling it aroused in her that he was defying authority. Even if her

innate respect for the printed word had not made her accept as final the

judgment of the newspapers, there was still the incontestable fact that

so many people had paid to see "Pretty Fanny" that both Oliver and Miss

Oldcastle had reaped a small fortune. She glanced in a helpless way at

Harry, and he said suddenly:

"Don't you think Jenny ought to come home to be with mother after Lucy

marries? You are obliged to go to New York so often that she will get

lonely."

"It's a good idea," agreed Oliver amiably, "but there's another case

where you'll have to use greater authority than mine. When I stopped

reforming people," he added gaily, "I began with my own family."

"The dear child would come in a minute if I suggested it," said

Virginia, "but she enjoys her life at college so much that I wouldn't

have her give it up for anything in the world. It would make me

miserable to think that any of my children made a sacrifice for me."

"You needn't worry. We've trained them differently," said Oliver, and

though his tone was slightly satirical, the satire was directed at

himself, not at his wife.

"I am sure it is what I should never want," insisted Virginia, almost

passionately, while she rose in response to the announcement of supper,

and met Lucy, in trailing pink chiffon, on the threshold.

"Are you sure your coat is warm enough, dear?" she asked. "Wouldn't you

like to wear my furs? They are heavier than yours."

"Oh, I'd love to, if you wouldn't mind, mother."

Raising herself on tiptoe, Lucy kissed Harry, and then ran to the

mirror, eager to see if the black fur looked well on her.

"They're just lovely on me, mother. I feel gorgeous!" she exclaimed

triumphantly, and indeed her charming girlish face rose like a white

flower out of the rich dark furs.

In Virginia's eyes, as she turned back in the doorway to watch her,

there was a radiant self-forgetfulness which illumined her features. For

a moment she lived so completely in her daughter's youth that her body

seemed to take warmth and colour from the emotion which transfigured

her.

"I am so glad, darling," she said. "It gives me more pleasure to see you

in them than it does to wear them myself." And though she did not know

it, she embodied her gentle philosophy of life in that single sentence.

CHAPTER III

MIDDLE-AGE

Jenny had promised to come home a week before Lucy's wedding, but at the

last moment, while they waited supper for her, a telegram announced with

serious brevity that she was "detained." Twenty-four hours later a

second telegram informed them that she would not arrive until the

evening before the marriage, and at six o'clock on that day, Virginia,

who had been packing Lucy's trunks ever since breakfast, looked out of

the window at the sound of the door-bell, and saw the cab which had

contained her second daughter standing beside the curbstone.

"Mother, have you the change to pay the driver?" asked a vision of stern

loveliness floating into the room. With the winter's glow in her cheeks

and eyes and the bronze sheen on her splendid hair, which was brushed in

rippling waves from her forehead and coiled in a severely simple knot on

her neck, she might have been a wandering goddess, who had descended,

with immortal calm, to direct the affairs of the household. Her white

shirtwaist, with its starched severity, suited her austere beauty and

her look of almost superhuman composure.

"Take off your hat, darling, and lie down on the couch while I finish

Lucy's packing," said Virginia, when she had sent the servant downstairs

to pay the cabman. Her soul was in her eyes while she watched Jenny

remove her plain felt hat, with its bit of blue scarf around the

crown--a piece of millinery which presented a deceptive appearance of

inexpensiveness--and pass the comb through the shining arch of her hair.

"I am so sorry, mother dear, I couldn't come before, but there were some

important lectures I really couldn't afford to miss. I am specializing

in biology, you know."

Her manner, calm, sweet, and gently condescending, was such as she might

have used to a child whom she loved and with whom she possessed an

infinite patience. One felt that while talking, she groped almost

unconsciously for the simplest and shortest words in which her meaning

might be conveyed. She did not lie down as Virginia had suggested, but

straightening her short skirt, seated herself in an upright chair by the

table and crossed her slender feet in their sensible, square-toed shoes.

While she gazed at her, Virginia remembered, with a smile, that Harry

had once said his sister was as flawless as a geometrical figure, and he

couldn't look at her without wanting to twist her nose out of shape. In

spite of her beauty, she was not attractive to men, whom she awed and

intimidated by a candid assumption of superiority. For Lucy's

conscienceless treatment of the male she had unmitigated contempt. Her

sister, indeed, had she not been her sister, would have appeared to her

as an object for frank condemnation--"one of those women who waste

themselves in foolish flirtations." As it was, loving Lucy, and being a

loyal soul, with very scientific ideas of her own responsibility for her

sister as well as for that abstract creature whom she classified as "the

working woman," she thought of Lucy tenderly as a "dear girl, but

simple." Her mother, of course, was, also, "simple"; but, then, what

could one expect of a woman whose only education had been at the

Dinwiddie Academy for Young Ladies? To Jenny, education had usurped the

place which the church had always occupied in the benighted mind of her

mother. All the evils of our civilization--and these evils shared with

the working woman the first right to her attention--she attributed to

the fact that the former generations of women had had either no

education at all, or worse even than that, had had the meretricious

brand of education which was supplied by an army of Miss Priscillas. For

Miss Priscilla herself, entirely apart from the Academy, which she

described frankly, to Virginia's horror, as "a menace," she entertained

a sincere devotion, and this ability to detach her judgments from her

affections made her appear almost miraculously wise to her mother, who

had been born a Pendleton.

"No, I'm not tired. Is there anything I can help you about, mother?" she

asked, for she was a good child and very helpful--the only drawback to

her assistance being that when she helped she invariably commanded.

"Oh, no, darling, I'll be through presently--just as soon as I get this

trunk packed. Lucy's things are lovely. I wish you had come in time to

see them. Miss Willy and I spent all yesterday running blue ribbons in

her underclothes, and though we began before breakfast, we had to sit up

until twelve o'clock so as to get through in time to begin on the trunks

this morning."

Her eyes shone as she spoke, and she would have enjoyed describing all

Lucy's clothes, for she loved pretty things, though she never bought

them for herself, finding it impossible to break the habit of more than

twenty years of economy; but Jenny, who was proud of her sincerity,

looked so plainly bored that she checked her flowing descriptions.

"I hope you brought something beautiful to wear to-morrow, Jenny?" she

ventured timidly, after a silence.

"Of course I had to get a new dress, as I'm to be maid of honour, but it

seemed so extravagant, for I had two perfectly good white chiffons

already."

"But it would have hurt Lucy, dear, if you hadn't worn something new.

She even wanted me to order my dress from New York, but I was so afraid

of wounding poor little Miss Willy--she has made my clothes ever since I

could remember--that I persuaded the child to let her make it. Of

course, it won't be stylish, but nobody will look at me anyway."

"I hope it is coloured, mother. You wear black too much. The

psychological effect is not good for you."

With her knees on the floor and her back bent over the trunk into which

she was packing a dozen pairs of slippers wrapped in tissue paper,

Virginia turned her head and stared in bewilderment at her daughter,

whose classic profile showed like marble flushed with rose in the

lamplight.

"But at my time of life, dear? Why, I'm in my forty-sixth year."

"But forty-six is still young, mother. That was one of the greatest

mistakes women used to make--to imagine that they must be old as soon as

men ceased to make love to them. It was all due to the idea that men

admired only schoolgirls and that as soon as a woman stopped being

admired she had stopped living."

"But they didn't stop living really. They merely stopped fixing up."

"Oh, of course. They spent the rest of their lives in the storeroom or

the kitchen slaving for the comfort of the men they could no longer

amuse."

This so aptly described Virginia's own situation that her interest in

Lucy's trousseau faded abruptly, while a wave of heartsickness swept

over her. It was as if the sharp and searching light of truth had fallen

suddenly upon all the frail and lovely pretences by which she had helped

herself to live and to be happy. A terror of the preternatural insight

of youth made her turn her face away from Jenny's too critical eyes.

"But what else could they do, Jenny? They believed that it was right to

step back and make room for the young," she said, with a pitiful attempt

at justification of her exploded virtues.

"Oh, _mother_!" exclaimed Jenny still sweetly, "whoever heard of a man

of that generation stepping back to make room for anybody?"

"But men are different, darling. One doesn't expect them to give up like

women."

"Oh, mother!"--this time the sweetness had borrowed an edge of irony. It

was Science annihilating tradition, and the tougher the tradition, the

keener the blade which Science must apply.

"I can't help it, dear, it is the way I was taught. My darling mother

felt like that"--a tear glistened in her eye--"and I am too old to

change my way of thinking."

"Mother, mother, you silly pet!" Rising from her chair, Jenny put her

arms about her and kissed her tenderly. "You can't help being

old-fashioned, I know. You are not to blame for your ideas; it is Miss

Priscilla." Her voice grew stern with condemnation as she uttered the

name. "But don't you think you might try to see things a little more

rationally? It is for your own sake I am speaking. Why should you make

yourself old by dressing as if you were eighty simply because your

grandmother did so?"

She was right, of course, for the trouble with Science is not its

blindness, but its serene infallibility. As useless to reject her

conclusions as to deny the laws and the principles of mathematics! After

all manner of denials, the laws and the principles would still remain.

Virginia, who had never argued in her life, did not attempt to do so

with her own daughter. She merely accepted the truth of Jenny's

inflexible logic; and with that obstinate softness which is an

inalienable quality of tradition, went on believing precisely what she

had believed before. To have made them think alike, it would have been

necessary to melt up the two generations and pour them into one--a task

as hopeless as an endeavour to blend the Dinwiddie Young Ladies' Academy

with a modern college. Jenny's clearly formulated and rather loud

morality was unintelligible to her mother, whose conception of duty was

that she should efface herself and make things comfortable for those

around her. The obligation to think independently was as

incomprehensible to Virginia as was that wider altruism which had swept

Jenny's sympathies beyond the home into the factory and beyond the

factory into the world where there were "evils." Her own instinct had

always been the true instinct of the lady to avoid "evil," not to seek

it, to avoid it, honestly if possible, and, if not honestly--well, to

avoid it at any cost. The love of truth for truth's sake was one of the

last of the virtues to descend from philosophy into a working theory of

life, and it had been practically unknown to Virginia until Jenny had

returned, at the end of her first year, from college. To be sure, Oliver

used to talk like that long ago, but it was so long ago that she had

almost forgotten it.

"You are very clever, dear--much too clever for me," she said, rising

from her knees. "I wonder if Lucy has anything else she wants to go into

this trunk? It might be packed a little tighter."

In response to her call, the door opened and Lucy entered breathlessly,

with her hair, which she had washed and not entirely dried, hanging over

her shoulders.

"What is it, mother? Oh, Jenny, you have come! I'm so glad!"

The sisters kissed delightedly. In spite of their lack of sympathy, they

were very fond of each other.

"Do you want to put anything else in this trunk before I lock it, Lucy?"

"Could you find room for my blue flannel bath robe? I'll want it on top

where I can get it out without unpacking, and, oh, mother, won't you

please put my alcohol stove and curling irons in my travelling bag?"

She was prettily excited, and during the last few days she had shown an

almost child-like confidence in her mother's opinions about the trivial

matters of packing.

"Mother, I don't want to come down yet--my hair isn't dry. Will you send

supper up to me? I'll dress about nine o'clock when Bertie and the girls

are coming."

"Of course I will, darling. I'll go straight downstairs and fix your

tray. Is there anything you can think of that you would like?"

At this Jenny broke into a laugh: "Why, anybody would think she was

dying instead of being married!"

"Just a cup of coffee. I really couldn't swallow a morsel," replied

Lucy, whose single manifestation of sentiment had been a complete loss

of appetite. "You needn't laugh, Jenny. Wait until you are going to be

married, and see if you are able to eat anything."

Putting the tray back into the trunk, Virginia closed it almost

caressingly. For twenty-four hours, as Lucy's wedding began to draw

nearer, she had been haunted by the feeling that she was losing her

favourite child, and though her reason told her that this was not

true--that Lucy was, in fact, less fond of her than either of the

others, and far less dear to her heart than Harry--still she was unable

wholly to banish the impression. It seemed only yesterday that she had

sat waiting, month after month, week after week, day after day, for her

to be born. Only yesterday that she had held her, a baby, in her arms,

and now she was packing the clothes which that baby would carry away

when she went off with her husband! Something of the hushed expectancy

of those long months of approaching motherhood enveloped her again with

the thought of Lucy's wedding to-morrow. After all, Lucy was her first

child--neither of the others had been awaited with quite the same

brooding ecstasy, with quite the same radiant dreams. To neither of the

others had she given herself at the hour of birth with such an

abandonment of her soul and body. And she had been a good child--all day

with a lump in her throat Virginia had assured herself again and again

that no child could have been better. A hundred little charming ways, a

hundred bright delicious tricks of expression and of voice, followed her

from room to room, as though Lucy had indeed, as Jenny said, been dying

upstairs instead of waiting to be married. And all the time, while she

arranged the supper tray and attended to the making of the coffee so

that it might be perfect, she was thinking, "Mother must have felt like

this when I was married and I never knew it, I never suspected." She saw

her little bedroom at the rectory, with her own figure, in the floating

tulle veil, reflected in the mirror, and her mother's face, that face

from which all remembrance of self seemed to have vanished, looking at

her over the bride's bouquet of white roses. If only she had told her

then that she understood! If only she had ever really understood until

to-night! If only it was not too late to turn back now and gather that

plaintive figure, waiting with the white roses, into her arms!

The next morning she was up at daybreak, finishing the packing,

preparing the house before leaving for church, making the final

arrangements for the wedding breakfast. When at last Lucy, with reddened

eyes and tightly curled hair, appeared in the pantry while her mother

was helping to wash a belated supply of glass and china which had

arrived from the caterer's, Virginia felt that the parting was worse

even than Harry's going to college.

"Mother, I've the greatest mind on earth not to do it."

"My pet, what is the matter?"

"I can't imagine why I ever thought I wanted to marry! I don't want to

do it a bit. I don't want to go away and leave you and father. And,

mother, I really don't believe that I love him!"

It was so like Lucy after months of cool determination, of perfect

assurance, of stubborn resistance to opposition--it was so exactly like

her to break down when it was too late and to begin to question whether

she really wanted her own way after she had won it. And it was so like

Virginia that at the first sign of weakness in her child she should grow

suddenly strong and efficient.

"My darling, it is only nervousness. You will be better as soon as you

begin to dress. Come upstairs and I will fix you a dose of aromatic

ammonia."

"Do you really think it's too late to stop it?"

"Not if you feel you are going to regret it, but you must be very sure

that it isn't merely a mood, Lucy."

At the first sign that the step was not yet irrevocable, the girl's

courage returned.

"Well, I suppose I'll have to get married now," she said, "but if I

don't like it, I'm not going to live with him."

"Not live with your husband! Why, Lucy!"

"It's perfectly absurd to think I'll have to live with a man if I find I

don't love him. Ask Jenny if it isn't."

Ask Jenny! This was her incredible suggestion! This was her reverence

for authority, for duty, for the thundering admonitions of Saint Paul!

As far as Saint Paul was concerned, he might as well have been the

ponderous anecdotal minister in the brick Presbyterian church around the

corner.

"But Jenny is so--so----" murmured Virginia, and stopped because words

failed her. Had Jenny been born in any family except her own, she would

probably have described her as "dangerous," but it was impossible to

brand her daughter with so opprobrious an epithet. The word, owing to

the metaphorical yet specific definition of it which she had derived

from the rector's sermons in her childhood, invariably suggested fire

and brimstone to her imagination.

"Well, I'm not going to do it unless I want to," returned Lucy

positively. "And you may look as shocked as you please, mother, but you

needn't pretend that you wouldn't be glad to see me."

The difference between the two girls, as far as Virginia could see, was

that Jenny really believed her awful ideas were right, and Lucy merely

believed that they might help her the more effectively to follow her

wishes.

"Of course I'd be glad to see you, but, Lucy, it pains me so to hear you

speak flippantly of your marriage. It is the most sacred day in your

life, and you treat it as lightly as if it were a picnic."

"Do I? Poor little day, have I hurt its feelings?"

They were on the way upstairs, following a procession of wedding

presents which had just arrived by express, and glancing round over the

heads of the servants, she made a laughing face at her mother. Clearly,

she was incorrigible, and her passing fear, which had evidently been

entirely due, as Virginia had suspected, to one of her rare attacks of

nervousness, had entirely disappeared. In her normal mood she was

perfectly capable of taking care of herself not only within the estate

of matrimony, but in an African jungle. She would in either situation

inevitably get what she wanted, and in order to get it she would shrink

as little from sacrificing a husband as from enslaving a savage.

And yet a few hours later, when she stood beneath her bridal veil and

gazed at her image in the cheval-glass in her bedroom, she presented so

enchanting a picture of virgin innocence, that Virginia could hardly

believe that she harboured in her breast, under the sacred white satin

of her bride's gown, the heretical opinions which she had uttered

downstairs in the pantry. Her charming face had attuned its expression

so perfectly to the dramatic values of the moment that she appeared, in

the words of that sentimental soul, Miss Priscilla, to be listening

already to "The Voice that Breathed o'er Eden."

"Doesn't mother look sweet?" she asked, catching sight of Virginia's

face in the mirror. "I love her in pale grey--only she ought to have

some flowers."

"I told father to order her a bunch of violets," answered Jenny. "I

wonder if he remembered to do it."

A look of pleasure, the first she had worn for days, flitted over

Virginia's face. She had all her mother's touching appreciation of

insignificant favours, and, perhaps because her pleasure was so

excessive, people shrank a little from arousing it. Like most persons

who thought perpetually of others, she was not accustomed to being

thought of very often in return.

But Oliver had remembered, and when the purple box was brought up to

her, and Jenny pinned the violets on her dress, a blush mantled her thin

cheeks, and she looked for a moment almost as young and lovely as her

daughters. Then Oliver came after Lucy, and gathering up her train, the

girl smiled at her mother and hurried out of the room. At the last

minute her qualms appeared suddenly to depart. Whatever happened in the

months and years that came afterwards, she had determined to get all she

could out of the excitement of the wedding. She had cast no loving

glance about the little room, where she was leaving her girlhood behind

her; but Virginia, lingering for an instant after the others had gone

out, looked with tear-dimmed eyes at the small white bed and the white

furniture decorated in roses. She suffered in that minute with an

intensity and a depth of feeling that Lucy had never known in the

past--that she would never know in the future--for it is given to

mothers to live not once, but twice or thrice or as many times as they

have children to live for. And the sunlight, entering through the high

window, fell very gently on the anxious love in her eyes, on the fading

white rose-leaves of her cheeks, and on the silvery mist of curls

framing her forehead.

* * * * *

That afternoon, when Lucy had motored off with her husband, and Oliver

and Jenny had gone riding together, Virginia went back again into the

room and put away the scattered clothes the girl had left. On the bed

was the little pillow, with the embroidered slip over a cover of pink

satin Virginia had made, and taking it from the bed she put it into one

of the boxes which had been left open until the last minute. As she did

so, it was as if a miraculous wand was waved over her memory, softening

Lucy's image until she appeared to her in all the angelic sweetness and

charm of her childhood. Her egoism, her selfishness, her lack of

consideration and of reverence, all those faults of an excessive

individualism embodied in the girl, vanished so completely that she even

forgot they had ever existed. Once again she felt in her breast the

burning rapture of young motherhood; once again she gathered her

first-born child--hers alone, hers out of the whole world of

children!--into her arms. A choking sensation rose in her throat, and,

dropping a handful of photographs which she had started to put away, she

hurried from the room, as though she were leaving something dead there

that she loved.

Downstairs, the caterers and the florists were in possession, carting

away glass and china, dismantling decorations, and ejecting palms as

summarily as though they had come uninvited. The servants were busy

sweeping floors and moving chairs and sofas back into place, and in the

kitchen the negro cook was placidly beginning preparations for supper.

For a time Virginia occupied herself returning the ornaments to the

drawing-room mantelpiece, and the illustrated gift books to the centre

table. When this was over she looked about her with the nervous

expectancy of a person who has been overwhelmed for months by a

multitude of exigent cares, and realized, with a start, that there was

nothing for her to do. To-morrow Oliver and Jenny were both going

away--he to New York to attend the rehearsals of his play, and she back

to finish her year at college--and Virginia would be left in an empty

house with all her pressing practical duties suddenly ended.

"You will have such a nice long rest now, mother dear," Lucy had said as

she clung to her before stepping into the car, and Virginia had agreed

unthinkingly that a rest for a little while would, perhaps, do her good.

Now, turning away from the centre table, where she had laid the last

useless volume in place, she walked slowly through the library to the

dining-room, and then from the dining-room into the pantry. Here, the

dishes were all washed, the cup-towels were drying in an orderly row

beside the sink, and the two maids and the butler were "drawing a

breath" in wooden chairs by the stove.

"There was enough chicken salad and ice cream left for supper, wasn't

there, Wotan?"

On being assured that there was enough for a week, she gave a few

directions about the distribution of the other food left from the

wedding breakfast, and then went out again and into Oliver's study. A

feeling of restlessness more acute than any she had ever known kept her

walking back and forth between the door and the window, which looked out

into a square of garden, where a few lonely sticks protruded out of the

discoloured snow on the grass. She had lived for others so long that

she had at last lost the power of living for herself.

There was nothing to do to-day; there would be nothing to do to-morrow;

and, unless Jenny came home to be married, there would be nothing to do

next year or the years after that. While Oliver was in Dinwiddie, she

had, of course, the pleasure of supplying his food and of watching him

eat it; but beyond that, even when he sat in the room with her, there

was little conversation between them. She herself loved to talk, for she

had inherited her mother's ability to keep up a honeyed flow of sound

about little things; but she had learned long ago that there were times

when her voice, rippling on about nothing, only irritated him, and with

her feminine genius for adaptability, she had made a habit of silence.

He never spoke to her of his work except in terms of flippant ridicule

which pained her, and the supreme topic of the children's school reports

had been absent now for many years. Companionship of a mental sort had

always been lacking between them, yet so reverently did she still accept

the traditional fictions of marriage, that she would have been

astonished at the suggestion that a love which could survive the shocks

of tragedy might at last fade away from a gradual decline of interest.

Nothing had happened. There had been no scenes, no quarrels, no

jealousies, no recriminations--merely a gentle, yet deliberate,

withdrawal of personalities. He had worshipped her at twenty-two, and

now, at forty-seven, there were moments when she realized with a stab of

pain that she bored him; but beyond this she had felt no cause for

unhappiness, and until the last year no cause even for apprehension.

The libertine had always been absent from his nature; and during all the

years of their marriage he had, as Susan put it, hardly so much as

looked at another woman. Whatever came between them, it would not be

physical passion, but a far subtler thing.

Going to his desk, she took up a photograph of Margaret Oldcastle and

studied it for a moment--not harshly, not critically, but with a pensive

questioning. It was hardly a beautiful face, but in its glowing

intellectuality, it was the face of a woman of power. So different was

the look of noble reticence it wore from that of the conventional type

of American actress, that while she gazed at it Virginia found herself

asking vaguely, "I wonder why she went on the stage?" The woman was not

a pretty doll--she was not a voluptuous enchantress--the coquetry of the

one and the flesh of the other were missing. If the stories Virginia had

heard of her were to be trusted, she had come out of poverty not by the

easy steps of managers' favours, but by hard work, self-denial, and

discipline. Though Virginia had never seen her, she felt instinctively

that she was an "honest woman."

And yet why did this face, which had in it none of the charms of the

seductress, disturb her so profoundly? She was too little given to

introspection, too accustomed to think always in concrete images, to

answer the question; but her intuition, rather than her thought, made

her understand dimly that the things she feared in Margaret Oldcastle

were the qualities in which she herself was lacking. Whatever power the

woman possessed drew its strength and its completeness from a source

which Virginia had never recognized as being necessary or even

beneficent to love. After all, was it not petty and unjust in her to be

hurt by Oliver's friendship for a woman who had been of such tremendous

assistance to him in his work? Had he not said a hundred times that she

had succeeded in making his plays popular without making them at the

same time ridiculous?

Putting the photograph back in its place on the desk, she turned away

and began walking again over the strip of carpet which led from the door

to the window. In the yard the dried stalks of last year's flowers

looked so lonely in the midst of the dirty snow, that she felt a sudden

impulse of sympathy. Poor things, they had outlived their usefulness.

The phrase occurred to her again, and she remembered how often her

father had applied it to women whose children had all married and left

them.

"Poor Matilda! She is restless and dissatisfied, and she doesn't

understand that it is because she has outlived her usefulness." At that

time "poor Matilda" had seemed to her an old woman--but, perhaps, she

wasn't in reality much over forty. How soon women grew old a generation

ago! Why, she felt as young to-day as she did the morning on which she

was married. She felt as young, and yet her hair was greying, her face

was wrinkled, and, like poor Matilda, she had outlived her usefulness.

While she stood there that peculiar sensation which comes to women when

their youth is over--the sensation of a changed world--took possession

of her. She felt that life was slipping, slipping past her, and that she

was left behind like a bit of the sentiment or the law of the last

century. Though she still felt young, it was not with the youth of

to-day. She had no part in the present; her ideals were the ideals of

another period; even her children had outgrown her. She saw now with a

piercing flash of insight, so penetrating, so impersonal, that it seemed

the result of some outside vision rather than of her own uncritical

judgment, that life had treated her as it treats those who give, but

never demand. She had made the way too easy for others; she had never

exacted of them; she had never held them to the austerity of their

ideals. Then the illumination faded as if it had been the malicious act

of a demon, and she reproached herself for allowing such thoughts to

enter her mind for an instant.

"I don't know what can be the matter with me. I never used to brood. I

wonder if it can be my time of life that makes me so nervous and

apprehensive?"

For so long she had waited for some definite point of time, for the

children to begin school, for them to finish school, for Harry to go off

to college, for Lucy to be married, that now, when she realized that

there was nothing to expect, nothing to prepare for, her whole nature,

with all the multitudinous fibres which had held her being together,

seemed suddenly to relax from its tension. To be sure, Oliver would come

home for a time at least after his rehearsals were over, Jenny would

return for as much of the holidays as her philanthropic duties

permitted, and, if she waited long enough, Harry would occasionally pay

her a visit. They all loved her; not one of them, she told herself,

would intentionally neglect her--but not one of them needed her! She had

outlived her usefulness!

The next afternoon, when Oliver and Jenny had driven off to the station,

she put on her street clothes, and went out to call on Susan, who lived

in a new house in High Street. Mrs. Treadwell, having worn out

everybody's patience except Susan's, had died some five years before,

and the incorrigible sentimentalists of Dinwiddie--there were many of

them--expressed publicly the belief that Cyrus had never been "the same

man since his wife's death." As a matter of fact, Cyrus, who had retired

from active finance in the same year that he lost Belinda, had missed

his business considerably more than he had missed his wife, whose loss,

if he had ever analyzed it, would have resolved itself into the absence

of somebody to bully. But on the very day that he had retired from work

he had begun to age rapidly, and now, standing on Susan's porch, he

suggested to Virginia an orange from which every drop of juice had been

squeezed. Of late he had taken to giving rather lavishly to churches,

with a vague, superstitious hope, perhaps, that he might buy the

salvation he had been too busy to work out in other ways. And so acute

had become his terror of death, Virginia had heard, that after every

attack of dyspepsia he dispatched a check to the missionary society of

the church he attended.

Upstairs, in her bedroom, Susan, who had just come in, was "taking off

her things," and she greeted Virginia with a delight which seemed, in

some strange way, to be both a balm and a stimulant. One thing, at

least, in her life had not altered with middle-age, and that was

Susan's devotion. She was a large, young, superbly vigorous woman of

forty-five, with an abundant energy which overflowed outside of her

household in a dozen different directions. She loved John Henry, but she

did not love him to the exclusion of other people; she loved her

children, but they did not absorb her. There was hardly a charity or a

public movement in Dinwiddie in which she did not take a practical

interest. She had kept her mind as alert as her body, and the number of

books she read had always shocked Virginia a little, who felt that time

for reading was obliged to be time subtracted from more important

duties.

"I've thought of you so much, Jinny, darling. You mustn't let yourself

begin to feel lonely."

Virginia shook her head with a smile, but in spite of her effort not to

appear depressed, there was a touching wistfulness in her eyes.

"Of course I miss the dear children, but I'm so thankful that they are

happy."

"I wish Jenny would come back home to stay with you."

"She would if I asked her, Susan"--her face showed her pleasure at the

thought of Jenny's willingness for the sacrifice--"but I wouldn't have

her do it for the world. She's so different from Lucy, who was quite

happy as long as she could have attention and go to parties. Of course,

it seems to me more natural for a girl to be like that, especially a

Southern girl, but Jenny says that she is obliged to have something to

think about besides men. I wonder what my dear father would have thought

of her?"

"She'll take you by surprise some day, and marry as suddenly as Lucy

did."

"That's what Oliver says, but Miss Priscilla is sure she'll be an old

maid, because she's so fastidious. It's funny how much more women exact

of men now than they used to. Don't you remember what a heroine the

women of Miss Priscilla's generation thought Mrs. Tom Peachey was

because she supported Major Peachey by taking boarders while he just

drank himself into his grave? Well, somebody mentioned that to Jenny the

other day and she said it was 'disgusting.'"

"I always thought so," said Susan, "but, Jinny, I'm more interested in

you than I am in Mrs. Peachey. What are you going to do with yourself?"

Almost unconsciously both had eliminated Oliver as the dominant figure

in Virginia's future.

"I don't know, dear. I wish my children were as young as yours. Bessie

is just six, isn't she?"

"You ought to have had a dozen children. Didn't you realize that Nature

intended you to do it?"

"I know"--a pensive look came into her face--"but we were very poor, and

after the three came so quickly, and the little one that I lost, Oliver

felt that we could not afford to have any others. I've so often thought

that I was never really happy except when I had a baby in my arms."

"It's a devilish trick of Nature's that she makes them stop coming at

the very time that you want them most. Forty-five is not much more than

half a lifetime, Jinny."

"And when one has lived in their children as I have done, of course, one

feels a little bit lost without them. Then, if Oliver were not obliged

to be away so much----"

Her voice broke, and Susan, leaning forward impulsively, put her arms

about her.

"Jinny, darling, I never saw you depressed before."

"I was never like this until to-day. It must be the weather--or my age.

I suppose I shall get over it."

"Of course you will get over it--but you mustn't let it grow on you. You

mustn't be too much alone."

"How can I help it? Oliver will be away almost all winter, and when he

is at home, he is so absorbed in his work that he sometimes doesn't

speak for days. Of course, it isn't his fault," she added hastily; "it

is the only way he can write."

"And you're alone now for the first time for twenty-five years. That's

why you feel it so keenly."

The look of unselfish goodness which made Virginia's face almost

beautiful at times passed like an edge of light across her eyes and

mouth. "Don't worry about me, Susan. I'll get used to it."

"You will, dear, but it isn't right. I wish Harry could have stayed in

Dinwiddie. He would have been such a comfort to you."

"But I wouldn't have had him do it! The boy is so brilliant. He has a

future before him. Already he has had several articles accepted by the

magazines"--her face shone--"and I hope that he will some day be as

successful as Oliver has been without going through the long struggle."

"Can't you go to England to see him in the summer?"

"That's what I want to do." It was touching to see how her animation and

interest revived when she began talking of Harry. "And when Oliver's

play is put on in February, he has promised to take me to New York for

the first night."

"I am glad of that. But, meanwhile, you mustn't sit at home and think

too much, Jinny. It isn't good for you. Can't you find an interest? If

you would only take up reading again. You used to be fond of it."

"I know, but one gets out of the habit. I gave it up after the children

came, when there was so much that was really important for me to do, and

now, to save my life, I can't get interested in a book except for an

hour or two at a time. I'm always stopping to ask myself if I'm not

neglecting something, just as I used to do while the children were

little. You see, I'm not a clever woman like you. I was made just to be

a wife and mother, and nothing else."

"But you're obliged to be something else now. You are only forty-five.

There may be forty more years ahead of you, and you can't go on being a

mother every minute of your time. Even if you have grandchildren, they

won't be like your own. You can't slave over them in the way you used to

do over yours. The girls' husbands and Harry's wife would have something

to say about it."

"Do you know, Susan, I try not to be little and jealous, but when you

said 'Harry's wife' so carelessly just now it brought a lump to my

throat."

"He will marry some day, darling, and you might as well accustom

yourself to the thought."

"I know, and I want him to do it. I shall love his wife as if she were

my daughter--but--but it seems to me at this minute as if I could not

bear it!"

The grey twilight, entering through the high window above her head,

enveloped her as tenderly as if it were the atmosphere of those romantic

early eighties to which she belonged. The small aristocratic head, with

its quaint old-fashioned clusters of curls on the temples, the delicate

stooping figure, a little bent in the chest, the whole pensive,

exquisite personality which expressed itself in that manner of gentle

self-effacement--these things spoke to Susan's heart, through the

softness of the dusk, with all the touching appeal of the past. It was

as if the inscrutable enigma of time waited there, shrouded in mystery,

for a solution which would make clear the meaning of the blighted

promises of life. She saw herself and Virginia on that May afternoon

twenty-five years ago, standing with eager hearts on the edge of the

future; she saw them waiting, with breathless, expectant lips, for the

miracle that must happen! Well, the miracle had happened, and like the

majority of miracles, it had descended in the act of occurrence from the

zone of the miraculous into the region of the ordinary. This was life,

and looking back from middle-age, she felt no impulse to regret the

rapturous certainties of youth. Experience, though it contained an

inevitable pang, was better than ignorance. It was good to have been

young; it was good to be middle-aged; and it would be good to be old.

For she was one of those who loved life, not because it was beautiful,

but because it was life.

"I must go," said Virginia, rising in the aimless way of a person who is

not moving toward a definite object.

"Stay and have supper with us, Jinny. John Henry will take you home

afterward."

"I can't, dear. The--the servants are expecting me."

She kissed Susan on the cheek, and taking up her little black silk bag,

turned to the door.

"Jinny, if I come by for you to-morrow, will you go with me to a board

meeting or two? Couldn't you possibly take an interest in some charity?"

It was a desperate move, but at the moment she could think of no other

to make.

"Oh, I am interested, Susan--but I have no executive ability, you know.

And--and, then, poor dear father used to have such a horror of women who

were always running about to meetings. He would never even let mother do

church work--except, of course, when there was a cake sale or a fair of

the missionary society."

Susan's last effort had failed, and as she followed Virginia downstairs

and to the front door, a look almost of gloom settled on her large

cheerful face.

"Try to pay some calls every afternoon, won't you, dear?" she said at

the door. "I'll come in to see you in the morning when we get back from

marketing."

Then she added softly, "If you are ever lonesome and want me, telephone

for me day or night. There's nothing on earth I wouldn't do for you,

Jinny."

Virginia's eyes were wonderful with love and gratitude as they shone on

her through the twilight. "We've been friends since we were two years

old, Susan, and, do you know, there is nobody in the world that I would

ask anything of as soon as I would of you."

A look of unutterable understanding and fidelity passed between them;

then turning silently away, Virginia descended the steps and walked

quickly along the path to the pavement, while Susan, after watching her

through the gate, shut the door and went upstairs to the nursery.

The town lay under a thin crust of snow, which was beginning to melt in

the chill rain that was falling. Raising her umbrella, Virginia picked

her way carefully over the icy streets, and Miss Priscilla, who was

looking in search of diversion out of her front window, had a sudden

palpitation of the heart because it seemed to her for a minute that

"Lucy Pendleton had returned to life." So one generation of gentle

shades after another had moved in the winter's dusk under the frosted

lamps of High Street.

Through the windows of her house a cheerful light streamed out upon the

piles of melting snow in the yard, and at the door one of her coloured

servants met her with the news that a telegram was on the hall table.

Before opening it she knew what it was, for Oliver's correspondence with

her had taken this form for more than a year.

"Arrived safely. Very busy. Call on John Henry if you need anything."

She put it down and turned hastily to letters from Harry and Jenny. The

first was only a scrawl in pencil, written with that boyish reticence

which always overcame Harry when he wrote to one of his family; but

beneath the stilted phrases she could read his homesickness and his

longing for her in every line.

"Poor boy, I am afraid he is lonely," she thought, and caressed the

paper as tenderly as if it had been the letter of a lover. He had

written to her every Sunday since he had first gone off to college and

several times she knew that he had denied himself a pleasure in order to

send her her weekly letter. Already, she had begun to trust to his

"sense of responsibility" as she had never, even in the early days of

her marriage, trusted to Oliver's.

Opening the large square envelope which was addressed in Jenny's

impressive handwriting, she found four closely written pages

entertainingly descriptive of the girl's journey back to college and of

the urgent interests she found awaiting her there. In this letter there

was none of the weakness of implied sentiment, there was none of the

plaintive homesickness she had read in Harry's. Jenny wrote regularly

and affectionately because she felt that it was her duty to do so, for,

unlike Lucy, who was heard from only when she wanted something, she was

a girl who obeyed sedulously the promptings of her conscience. But if

she loved her mother, she was plainly not interested in her. Her

attitude towards life was masculine rather than feminine; and Virginia

had long since learned that in the case of a man it is easier to inspire

love than it is to hold his attention. Harry was different, of

course--there was a feminine, or at least a poetic, streak in him which

endowed him with that natural talent for the affections which is

supposed to be womanly--but Jenny resembled Oliver in her preference for

the active rather than for the passive side of experience.

Going upstairs, Virginia took off her hat and coat, and, without

changing her dress, came down again with a piece of fancy-work in her

hands. Placing herself under the lamp in Oliver's study, she took a few

careful stitches in the centrepiece she was embroidering for Lucy, and

then letting her needle fall, sat gazing into the wood-fire which

crackled softly on the brass andirons. From the lamp on the desk an

amber glow fell on the dull red of the leather-covered furniture, on the

pale brown of the walls, on the rich blending of oriental colours in the

rug at her feet. It was the most comfortable room in the house, and for

that reason she had fallen into the habit of using it when Oliver was

away. Then, too, his personality had impressed itself so ineffaceably

upon the surroundings which he had chosen and amid which he had worked,

that she felt nearer to him while she sat in his favourite chair,

breathing the scent of the wood-fire he loved.

She thought of the "dear children," of how pleased she was that they

were all well and happy, of how "sweet" Harry and Jenny were about

writing to her; and so unaccustomed was she to thinking in the first

person, that not until she took up her embroidery again and applied her

needle to the centre of a flower, did she find herself saying aloud: "I

must send for Miss Willy to-morrow and engage her for next week. That

will be something to do."

And looking ahead she saw days of endless stitching and basting, of

endless gossip accompanied by the cheerful whirring of the little

dressmaker's machine. "I used to pity Miss Willy because she was obliged

to work," she thought with surprise, "but now I almost envy her. I

wonder if it is work that keeps her so young and brisk? She's never had

anything in her life, and yet she is so much happier than some people

who have had everything."

The maid came to announce supper, and, gathering up her fancy-work,

Virginia laid it beside the lamp on the end of Oliver's writing table.

As she did so, she saw that her photograph, taken the year of her

marriage, which he usually carried on his journeys, had been laid aside

and overlooked when he was packing his papers. It was the first time he

had forgotten it, and a little chill struck her heart as she put it back

in its place beside the bronze letter rack. Then the chill sharpened

suddenly until it became an icy blade in her breast, for she saw that

the picture of Margaret Oldcastle was gone from its frame.

CHAPTER IV

LIFE'S CRUELTIES

There was a hard snowstorm on the day Oliver returned to Dinwiddie, and

Virginia, who had watched from the window all the afternoon, saw him

crossing the street through a whirl of feathery flakes. The wind drove

violently against him, but he appeared almost unconscious of it, so

buoyant, so full of physical energy was his walk. Never had he looked

more desirable to her, never more lovable, than he did at that instant.

Something, either a trick of imagination or an illusion produced by the

flying whiteness of the storm, gave him back for a moment the glowing

eyes and the eager lips of his youth. Then, as she turned towards the

door, awaiting his step on the stairs, the mirror over the mantel showed

her her own face, with its fallen lines, its soft pallor, its look of

fading sweetness. She had laid her youth down on the altar of her love,

while he had used love, as he had used life, merely to feed the flame of

the unconquerable egoism which burned like genius within him.

He came in, brushing a few flakes of snow from his sleeve, and it seemed

to her that the casual kindness of his kiss fell like ice on her cheek

as he greeted her. It was almost three months since he had seen her, for

he had been unable to come home for Christmas, but from his manner he

might have parted from her only yesterday. He was kind--he had never

been kinder--but she would have preferred that he should strike her.

"Are you all right?" he asked gently, turning to warm his hands at the

fire. "Beastly cold, isn't it?"

"Oh, yes, I am all right, dear. The play is a great success, isn't it?"

His face clouded. "As such things go. It's awful rot, but it's made a

hit--there's no doubt of that."

"And the other one, 'The Home'--when is the first night of that?"

"Next week. On Thursday. I must get back for it."

"And I am to go with you, am I not? I have looked forward to it all

winter."