“I? I don’t believe in sirens who break hearts just for fun and vanity. And as for Cherry, if he did meet with a little trouble, he’d mend up again, heart and lungs and all. There’s something happy-go-lucky about him—don’t you think so?”
“I think Cherry is too many-sided to be left without an object in life, if that is what you mean,” said Virginia. “Besides, it is so different for a man, they can always do something.”
Then Ruth put aside the little uneasy feeling of self-reproach and doubt that had prompted her to talk about Cherry, and put her arms round Virginia, kissing her tenderly.
“My darling Queenie! You have been fretting all by yourself at Elderthwaite till things seem worse than they are.”
“No,” said Virginia; “but my life has all gone wrong. When I found that he did not love me everything seemed over for me.”
Ruth interposed a question, and at last acquired a clearer knowledge of the circumstances under which Alvar and her cousin had parted. She had a good deal of knowledge of the world, and some judgment, though she did not always use it for her own benefit, and she did not think that the case sounded hopeless. She tried an experiment.
“If you gave him up, Queenie, because you discovered that he did not come up to your notions of what he ought to be, why there’s an end of it, for he never will; but it looks to me much more like a very commonplace lovers’ quarrel aggravated by circumstances. He isn’t a bad sort of fellow in his own way; but it’s not the way that you think perfection.”
“I did not quarrel with him, and I think the failure was in myself. Why should he love me?—it does not seem as if I was very lovable.”
There crossed Virginia’s young gentle face a look that was like a foretaste of the bitterness and self-weariness that had seized on so many of her race—a sort of self-scorn that was not wholesome.
“Why should you think so?” said Ruth.