"Well, as long as you look like that you needn't hope for a change," remarked Stephen admiringly. Then, turning his gaze away from her too obvious brightness, he looked into the tranquil depths of Margaret's blue eyes, and thought how much more restful the old-fashioned type of woman must have been. Men didn't need to bestir themselves and sharpen their wits with women like that; they were accepted, with their inherent virtues or vices, as philosophically as one accepted the seasons.
It was a dull supper, he thought, because his mind was distracted; but a little later, when they had returned to the drawing-room, and the family had drifted away in separate directions—Mary Byrd and Peyton to a dance, his father to his library, and his mother and the three other girls to a game of bridge in the next room, he received an amazing revelation of Margaret's point of view. His sentiment for the girl had always suffered, he was aware, from too many opportunities. He had sometimes wished that an obstacle might arise, that the formidable parents would try for once to tear them apart instead of thrust them together, but, in spite of the changeless familiarity of their association, he was presently to discover how little he had known of the real Margaret beneath the flowing grace and the nut-brown hair and the eyes like blue larkspur. Though the tribal customs had shaped her body and formed her manners, a rare essence of personality escaped like a perfume from the hereditary mould of the race.
As he looked at her now, sitting gracefully on the ruby brocade of one of the rosewood chairs, with her lovely head framed by the band of intricate carving, he was aware that the delicate subtleties and shadings of her feminine charm made an entirely fresh appeal to his perceptions, if not to his senses. He had never admired her appearance more than he did at that instant; and yet his gaze was as dispassionate as the one he bestowed on the Sully portrait of which she reminded him. Her eyes were very soft; there was a faint smile on her thin pink lips which gave the look of coldness, of reticence to her face. With her head bent and her hands folded in her lap, she sat there waiting pensively—for what? It occurred to him suddenly with a shock that she was deeper, far deeper than he had ever suspected.
"You are so different from the other girls, Margaret," he said at last, oppressed by the old difficulty of making conversation. "You don't belong to the same world with Mary Byrd and—" He was going to add "Patty Vetch," but he checked himself before the name escaped him.
She seemed to melt rather than break from her attitude of waiting, so gently did her movements sink into the shadowy glow of the firelight.
"No, I don't," she replied, with a touch of sadness. "I sometimes wish that I did."
"You wish that you did!" Here was surprise at last. "But, why, in Heaven's name, should you wish that when you are everything that they ought to be?"
"As if that mattered!" There was a tone in her voice that was new to him. "It's gone out of fashion to be superior. Nobody even cares any longer about your being what you ought to be. I've been trained to be the kind of girl that doesn't get on to-day, full of all sorts of forgotten virtues and refinements. Nobody looks at me because everybody is staring so hard at the girls who are improperly dressed. There is only one place where I can be sure of having attention, and that is in an Old Ladies' Home. Old ladies admire me."
For the second time that day he found himself startled by the eccentricities of the feminine mind; but in Margaret's passive resignation there was none of Patty's rebellion against the cruelty and injustice of life. Generations of acquiescence were in the slender figure before him; and he realized that the completeness of her surrender to Fate must have softened her destiny. Both girls were victims of the changing fashion in women, of an age that moved not in a stream, but in a whirlpool.
"I admire you," he said in a caressing voice, "more than I admire any one else in the world."