One Man in His Time

by Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow

"Do you think he cares for you, dear?" asked Corinna softly.

"Oh, yes." The response was unhesitating. "I know it."

How naive, how touchingly ingenuous, the girl was in spite of her experience of life and of the uglier side of politicians. No girl in Corinna's circle would ever have appeared so confiding, so innocent, so completely beneath the spell of a sentimental illusion. The girls that Corinna knew might be unguarded about everything else on earth; but even the most artless one of them, even Margaret Blair, would have learned by instinct to guard the secret of her emotions.

"Has he asked you to marry him?" Corinna's voice wavered over the question, which seemed to her cruel; but Patty met it with transparent simplicity.

"Not yet," she answered, lifting her shining eyes to the sky, "but he will. How can he help it when he cares for me so much?"

"If he hasn't yet, my dear"—while the words dropped from her reluctant lips, Corinna felt as if she were inflicting a physical stab,—"how can you tell that he cares so much for you?"

"I wasn't sure until yesterday," replied Patty, with beaming lucidity, "but I knew yesterday because—because he showed it so plainly."

With a lovely protective movement the older woman put her arm about the girl's shoulders. "You may be right—but, oh, don't trust too much, Patty," she pleaded, with the wisdom that the years bring and take away. "Life is so uncertain—fine impulses—even love—yes, love most of all—is so uncertain—"

"Of course you feel that way," responded the girl, sympathetic but incredulous. "How could you help it?"

After this what could Corinna answer? She knew Stephen, she told herself, and she knew that she could trust him. She believed that lie was capable of generous impulses; but she doubted if an impulse, however generous, could sweep away the inherited sentiments which encrusted his outlook on life. In spite of his youth, he was in reality so old. He was as old as that indestructible entity, the spirit of race—as that impalpable strain which had existed in every Culpeper, and in all the Culpepers together, from the beginning. It was not, she realized plainly, such an anachronism as a survival of the aristocratic tradition. Deeper than this, it had its roots not in belief but in instinct—in the bone and fibre of Stephen's character. It was a part of that motive power which impelled him in the direction of the beaten road, of the established custom, of things as they have always been in the past.