"But it was for their sake that you let yourself go—you gave up everything else for them from the minute that they were born."
A tear shone in Virginia's eye, and Susan knew, without having it put into words, that a wound somewhere in that gentle heart was still hurting. "I'd like to slap them!" she thought fiercely, and then she said aloud with a manner of cheerful conviction:
"You are a great deal too good for them, Jinny, and some day they will know it."
A longing came over her to take the thin little figure in her arms and shake back into her something of the sparkle and the radiance of her girlhood. Why did beauty fade? Why did youth grow middle-aged? Above all, why did love and sacrifice so often work their own punishment?
CHAPTER II
THE PRICE OF COMFORT
Virginia knelt on the cushioned seat in the bay-window of her bedroom, gazing expectantly down on the pavement below. It was her forty-fifth birthday, and she was impatiently waiting for Harry, who was coming home for a few days before going abroad to finish his studies at Oxford. The house was a new, impeccably modern dwelling, produced by a triumph of the utilitarian genius of the first decade of the twentieth century, and Oliver had bought it at a prodigious price a few years after his dramatic success had lifted him from poverty into comfort. The girls, charmed to have made the momentous passage into Sycamore Street, were delighted with the space and elegance of their new home, but Virginia had always felt somehow as if she were visiting. The drawing-room, and especially the butler's pantry, awed her. She had not dared to wash those august shelves with soda, nor to fasten her favourite strips of white oilcloth along their shining surfaces. The old joy of "fixing up" her storeroom had been wrested from her by the supercilious mulatto butler, who wore immaculate shirt fronts, but whom she suspected of being untidy beneath his magnificent exterior. Once when she had discovered a bucket of apple-parings tucked away under the sink, where it had stood for days, he had given "notice" so unexpectedly and so haughtily that she had been afraid ever since to look under dish-towels or into hidden places while he was absent. Out of the problem of the South "the servant question" had arisen to torment and intimidate the housekeepers of Dinwiddie; and inferior service at high wages was regarded of late as a thing for which one had come to be thankful. Had they still lived in the little house, Virginia would gladly have done her work for the sake of the peace and the cleanliness which it would have ensured; but since the change in their circumstances, Oliver and the girls had grown so dependent upon the small luxuries of living that she put up with anything—even with the appalling suspicion that every mouthful she ate was not clean—rather than take the risk of having her three servants desert in a body. When she had unwisely complained to Oliver, he had remarked impatiently that he couldn't be bothered about the housekeeping, and Lucy had openly accused her of being "fussy."
After this she had said nothing more, but gathering suddenly all her energies, she had precipitated a scene with the servants (which ended to her relief in the departure of the magnificent butler) and had reorganized at a stroke the affairs of her household. For all her gentleness, she was not incapable of decisive action, and though it had always been easier for her to work herself than to direct others, her native talent for domesticity had enabled her to emerge triumphantly out of this crisis. Now, on her forty-fifth birthday, she could reflect with pride (the pride of a woman who has mastered her traditional métier de femme) that there was not a house in Dinwiddie which had better food or smoother service than she provided in hers. For more and more, as Oliver absorbed himself in his work, which kept him in New York many months of the year, and the children grew so big that they no longer needed her, did her life centre around the small monotonous details of cooking and cleaning. Only when, as occasionally happened, the rest of the family were absent together, Oliver about his plays, Lucy on a visit to Richmond, and Harry and Jenny at college, an awful sense of futility descended upon her, and she felt that both the purpose and the initiative were sapped from her character. Sometimes, during such days or weeks of loneliness, she would think of her mother's words, uttered so often in the old years at the rectory: "There isn't any pleasure in making things unless there's somebody to make them for."
Beyond the window, the November day, which had been one of placid contentment for her, was slowly drawing to its close. The pale red line of an autumn sunset lingered in the west above the huddled roofs of the town, while the mournful dusk of evening was creeping up from the earth. A few chilled and silent sparrows hopped dejectedly along the bared boughs of the young maple tree in front of the house, and every now and then a brisk pedestrian would pass on the concrete pavement below. Inside, a cheerful fire burned in the grate, and near it, on one end of the chintz-covered couch, lay Oliver's present to her—a set of black bear furs, which he had brought down with him from New York. Turning away from the window, she slipped the neck-piece over her shoulders, and as she did so, she tried to stifle the wonder whether he would have bought them—whether even he would have remembered the date—if Harry had not been with him. Last year he had forgotten her birthday—and never before had he given her so costly a present as this. They were beautiful furs, but even she, with her ignorance of the subtler arts of dress, saw that they were too heavy for her, that they made her look shrunken and small and accentuated the pallor of her skin, which had the colour and the texture of withered rose-leaves. "They are just what Jenny has always wanted, and they would be so becoming to her. I wonder if Oliver would mind my letting her take them back to Bryn Mawr after the holidays?"