"I'm sorry you never liked him, Sally. He's a great man."
"Well, he isn't my great man anyway," she retorted. "I prefer Dr. Theophilus or George."
I laughed gayly. "The doctor is a mollycoddle and George is a fop." My tone was jaunty, yet her words were like the prick of a needle in a sensitive place. What was her praise of George except the confession of an appreciation of the very things that I could never possess? I knew she loved me and not George—was not her marriage a proof of this sufficient to cover a lifetime?—yet I knew also that the external graces which I treated with scorn because I lacked them, held for her the charm of habit, of association, of racial memory. Would the power in me that had captured her serve as well through a future of familiar possession as it had served in the supreme moment of conquest? I could not go through life, as I had once said, forever pushing a wheel up a hill, and the strength of a shoulder might prove, after all, less effective in the freedom of daily intercourse than the quickness or delicacy of a manner. Would she begin to regret presently, I wondered, the lack in the man she loved of those smaller virtues which in the first rosy glow of romance had seemed to her insignificant and of little worth?
"There are worse things than a mollycoddle or a fop," she rejoined after a pause, and added quickly, while old Esdras left the dining-room to answer a ring at the bell, "That's either Bonny Page or George now. One of them is coming to take me out."
For a moment I hoped foolishly that the visitor might be Bonny Page, but the sound of George's pleasant drawling voice was heard speaking to old Esdras, and as the curtains swung back, he crossed the threshold and came over to take Sally's outstretched hand.
"You're lunching late to-day," he said. "I don't often find you here at this hour, Ben."
"No, I'm not a man-about-town like you," I replied, pushing the cigars and the lamp toward him; "the business of living takes up too much of my time."
He leaned over, without replying to me, his hand on the back of Sally's chair, his eyes on her face.
"It's all right, Sally," he said in a low voice, and when he drew back, I saw that he had laid a spray of sweet alyssum on the table beside her plate.
Her eyes shone suddenly as if she were looking at sunlight, and when she smiled up at him, there was an expression in her face, half gratitude, half admiration, that made it very beautiful. While I watched her, I tried to overcome an ugly irrational resentment because George had been the one to call that tremulous new beauty into existence.