"Why couldn't you come too, Jinny?"
"Oh, I shouldn't have time—and, besides, I gave it up long ago. I don't think a mother has any business on horseback."
"All the same I wish you wouldn't let yourself go to pieces. What have you done to your hands? They used to be so pretty."
She drew them hastily away, while the tears rose in a mist to her eyes. It was like a man—it was especially like Oliver—to imagine that she could clean up half a house and take charge of three children, yet keep her hands as white and soft as they had been when she was a girl and did nothing except wait for a lover. In a flash of memory, she saw the reddened and knotted hands of her mother, and then a procession of hands belonging to all the mothers of her race that had gone before her. Were her own but a single pair in that chain of pathetic hands that had worked in the exacting service of Love?
"It is so hard to keep them nice," she said; but her heart cried, "What do my hands matter when it is for your sake that I have spoiled them?" With her natural tendency to undervalue the physical pleasures of life, she had looked upon her beauty as a passing bloom which would attract her lover to the veiled wonders of her spirit. Fleshly beauty as an end in itself would have appeared to her as immoral a cult as the wilful pursuit of a wandering desire in the male.
"I never noticed until to-night what pretty hands Abby has," he said, innocently enough, as he turned off the gas.
A strange sensation—something which was so different from anything she had ever felt before that she could not give it a name—pierced her heart like an arrow. Then it fled as suddenly as it had come, and left her at ease with the thought: "Abby has had nothing to hurt her hands. Why shouldn't they be pretty?" But not for Abby's hands would she have given up a single hour when she had washed Jenny's little flannels or dug enchanted garden beds with Harry's miniature trowel.
"She used to have a beautiful figure," she said with perfect sincerity.
"Well, she's got it still, though she's a trifle too large for my taste. You can't help liking her—she's such jolly good company, but, somehow, she doesn't seem womanly. She's too fond of sport and all that sort of thing."
His ideal woman still corresponded to the type which he had chosen for his mate; for true womanliness was inseparably associated in his mind with those qualities which had awakened for generations the impulse of sexual selection in the men of his race. Though he enjoyed Abby, he refused stubbornly to admire her, since evolution, which moves rapidly in the development of the social activities, had left his imagination still sacredly cherishing the convention of the jungle in the matter of sex. He saw woman as dependent upon man for the very integrity of her being, and beyond the divine fact of this dependency, he did not see her at all. But there was nothing sardonic in his point of view, which had become considerably strengthened by his marriage to Virginia, who shared it. It was one of those mental attitudes, indeed, which, in the days of loose thinking and of hazy generalizations, might have proved its divine descent by its universality. Oliver, his Uncle Cyrus, the rector, and honest John Henry, however they may have differed in their views of the universe or of each other, were one at least in accepting the historical dogma of the supplementary being of woman.