Virginia

by Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow

"I'm afraid I can't. I've an appointment down-town, but I'll come back as early as I can."

Then she went out and along the hall to the elevator, in which there was a little girl, who reminded her of Jenny, in charge of a governness in spectacles. She smiled at her almost unconsciously, so spontaneous, so interwoven with her every mood was her love for children; but the little girl, being very proper for her years, did not smile back, and a stab of pain went through Virginia's heart.

"Even children have ceased to care for me," she thought.

At the door, where she waited a few minutes for her taxicab, a young bride, with her eyes shining with joy, stood watching her husband while he talked with an acquaintance, and it seemed to Virginia that it was a vision of her own youth which had risen to torment her. "That was the way I looked at Oliver twenty-five years ago," she said to herself; "twenty-five years ago, when I was young and he loved me." Then, even while the intolerable pain was still in her heart, she felt that something of the buoyant hopefulness of that other bride entered into her and restored her courage. A resolution, so new that it was born of the joyous glance of a stranger, and yet so old that it seemed a part of that lost spirit of youth which had once carried her in a wild race over the Virginian meadows, a resolution which belonged at the same time to this other woman and to herself, awoke in her and mingled like a draught of wine with her blood. "I will not give up," she thought. "I will go to her. Perhaps she does not know—perhaps she does not understand. I will go to her, and everything may be different." Then her taxicab was called, and stepping into it, she gave the name not of a shop, but of the apartment house in which Margaret Oldcastle lived.

It was one of those February days when, because of the promise of spring in the air, men begin suddenly to think of April. The sky was of an intense blue, with little clouds, as soft as feathers, above the western horizon. On the pavement the last patches of snow were rapidly melting, and the gentle breeze which blew in at the open window of the cab, was like a caressing breath on Virginia's cheek. "It must be that she does not understand," she repeated, and this thought gave her confidence and filled her with that unconquerable hope of the future without which she felt that living would be impossible. Even the faces in the street cheered her, for it seemed to her that if life were really what she had believed it to be last night, these men and women could not walk so buoyantly, could not smile so gaily, could not spend so much thought and time on the way they looked and the things they wore. "No, it must have been a mistake, a ghastly mistake," she insisted almost passionately. "Some day we shall laugh over it together as we laughed over my jealousy of Abby. He never loved Abby, not for a minute, and yet I imagined that he did and suffered agony because of it." And her taxicab went on merrily between the cheerful crowds on the pavements, gliding among gorgeous motor cars and carriages drawn by high-stepping horses and pedlers' carts drawn by horses that stepped high no longer, among rich people and poor people, among surfeited people and hungry people, among gay people and sad people, among contented people and rebellious people—among all these, who hid their happiness or their sorrow under the mask of their features, her cab spun onward bearing her lightly on the most reckless act of her life.

At the door of the apartment house she was told that Miss Oldcastle could not be seen, but, after sending up her card and waiting a few moments in the hall before a desk which reminded her of a gilded squirrel-cage, she was escorted to the elevator and borne upward to the ninth landing. Here, in response to the tinkle of a little bell outside of a door, she was ushered into a reception room which was so bare alike of unnecessary furniture and of the Victorian tradition to which she was accustomed, that for an instant she stood confused by the very strangeness of her surroundings. Then a charming voice, with what sounded to her ears as an affected precision of speech, said: "Mrs. Treadwell, this is so good of you!" and, turning, she found herself face to face with the other woman in Oliver's life.

"I saw you at the play last night," the voice went on, "and I hoped to get a chance to speak to you, but the reporters simply invaded my dressing-room. Won't you sit here in the sunshine? Shall I close the window, or, like myself, are you a worshipper of the sun?"

"Oh, no, leave it open. I like it." At any other moment she would have been afraid of an open window in February; but it seemed to her now that if she could not feel the air in her face she should faint. With the first sight of Margaret Oldcastle, as she looked into that smiling face, in which the inextinguishable youth was less a period of life than an attribute of spirit, she realized that she was fighting not a woman, but the very structure of life. The glamour of the footlights had contributed nothing to the flame-like personality of the actress. In her simple frock of brown woollen, with a wide collar of white lawn turned back from her splendid throat, she embodied not so much the fugitive charm of youth, as that burning vitality over which age has no power. The intellect in her spoke through her noble rather than beautiful features, through her ardent eyes, through her resolute mouth, through every perfect gesture with which she accompanied her words. She stood not only for the elemental forces, but for the free woman; and her freedom, like that of man, had been built upon the strewn bodies of the weaker. The law of sacrifice, which is the basic law of life, ruled here as it ruled in mother-love and in the industrial warfare of men. Her triumph was less the triumph of the individual than of the type. The justice not of society, but of nature, was on her side, for she was one with evolution and with the resistless principle of change. Vaguely, without knowing that she realized these things, Virginia felt that the struggle was useless; and with the sense of failure there awoke in her that instinct of good breeding, that inherited obligation to keep the surface of life sweet, which was so much older and so much stronger than the revolt in her soul.

"You were wonderful last night. I wanted to tell you how wonderful I thought you," she said gently. "You made the play a success—all the papers say so this morning."

"Well, it was an easy play to make successful," replied the other, while a fleeting curiosity, as though she were trying to explain something which she did not quite understand, appeared in her face and made it, with its redundant vitality, almost coarse for an instant. "It's the kind the public wants, you couldn't help making it go."