Then she tripped out with her springy step, which had kept its elasticity through war and famine, while Oliver, gazing after her, wondered whether it was philosophy or merely a love of pleasure that sustained her? Was it thought or the absence of thought that produced her wonderful courage?
He heard her tread on the stairs; then the sound passed to the front hall; and a minute later there floated up the laughter with which the assembled boarders received her. Closing the door, which she had left open, he turned back to the window and stared from his hilltop down on the red roofs of Dinwiddie. White as milk, the moonlight lay on the brick wall at the foot of the garden, and down the gradual hill rows of chimneys were outlined against the faintly dappled sky in the west. In the next yard a hollow tree looked as if it were cut out of silver, and beneath its boughs, which drooped into the alley, he could see the huddled figure of an aged negress who had fallen asleep on a flagstone. So still was the night that the very smoke appeared to hang suspended above the tops of the chimneys, as though it were too heavy to rise and yet too light to float downward toward the motionless trees. Under the pale beams the town lost its look of solidity and grew spectral. Nothing seemed to hold it to the earth except the stillness which held the fallen flowers of the syringa there also. Even the church towers showed like spires of thistledown, and the winding streets, which ran beside clear walls and dark shining gardens, trailed off from the ground into the silvery air. Only the black bulk of the Treadwell factory beside the river defied the magic of the moon's rays and remained a solid reminder of the brevity of all enchantment.
Gradually, while Oliver waited for Mrs. Peachey's return, he ceased to think of the furniture in his room; he ceased to think even of the way in which he should manage to do his work, and allowed his mind to dwell, almost with a feeling of ecstasy, on the memory of Virginia. He saw the mist of little curls on her temples, her blue eyes, with their good and gentle expression, and the look of radiant happiness which played like light over her features. The beauty of the night acted as a spur to his senses. He wanted companionship. He wanted the smile and the touch of a woman. He wanted to fall in love with a girl who had blue eyes and a mouth like a flower!
"It wouldn't take me ten minutes to become a fool about her," he thought. "Confound this moonlight, anyhow. It's making an idiot of me."
Like many persons of artistic sensibility, he had at times the feeling that his imagination controlled his conduct, and under the sharp pressure of it now, he began to picture what the end would be if he were to fling himself headlong in the direction where his desires were leading him. If he could only let himself go! If he could only defy the future! If he could only forget in a single crisis that he was a Treadwell!
"If I were the right sort, I suppose I'd rush in and make her fall in love with me, and then marry her and let her starve," he thought. "But somehow I can't. I'm either not enough of a genius or not enough of a Treadwell. When it comes to starving a woman in cold blood, my conscience begins to balk. There's only one thing it would balk at more violently, and that is starving my work. That's what Uncle Cyrus would like—nothing better. By Jove! the way he looked when he had the nerve to make that proposition! And I honestly believe he thought I was going to agree to it. I honestly believe he was surprised when I stood out against him. He's a downright idiot, that's what is the matter with him. Why, it would be a crime, nothing less than a crime, for me to give up and go hunting after freight orders. Any ninny can do that. James can do that—but he couldn't see, he positively couldn't see that I'd be wasted at it."
The vision of Cyrus had banished the vision of Virginia, and leaving the window, Oliver began walking rapidly back and forth between the washstand and the bare bedstead. The fire of his ambition, which opposition had fanned into a blaze, had never burned more brightly in his heart than it did at that instant. He felt capable not only of renouncing Virginia, but of reforming the world. While he walked there, he dedicated himself to art as exclusively as Cyrus had ever dedicated himself to money—since Nature, who had made the individual, had been powerless to eradicate this basic quality of the type. A Treadwell had always stood for success, and success meant merely seeing but one thing at a time and seeing that thing at every instant. It meant to Cyrus and to James the thought of money as absolutely as it meant to Oliver the thought of art. The way to it was the same, only the ideas that pointed the way were different. To Cyrus and to James, indeed, as to all Treadwells everywhere, the idea was hardly an idea at all, since it had been crystallized by long usage into a fact. The word "success" (and what was success except another name for the universal Treadwell spirit?) invariably assumed the image of the dollar in the mind of Cyrus, while to Oliver, since his thinking was less carefully coördinated, it was without shape or symbol. Pacing the dusty floor, with the pale moonlight brooding like a flock of white birds over the garden, the young man would have defined the word as embracing all the lofty aspirations in the human soul. It was the hour when youth scaled the heights and wrested the divine fire from the heavens. At the moment he was less an individual than the embodied age of two-and-twenty. He was intellect in adolescence—intellect finding its strength—intellect in revolt against the tyranny of industrialism.
The staircase creaked softly, and following a knock at the door, Mrs. Peachey entered with her arms full of bed-clothes.
"I am so sorry I kept you waiting, Mr. Treadwell, but I was obliged to stop to speak to a caller. Oh, thank you. Do you really know how to make up a bed? How very clever of you! I'm sure Mr. Peachey couldn't do such a thing if his life depended upon it. Men are so helpless that it surprises me—it really does—when they know how to do anything. Oh, of course, you have lived about the world so much that you have had to learn how to manage. And you've been abroad? How very interesting! Some day when I have the time you must tell me about it. Not that I should ever care to go myself, but I love to hear other people talk about their travels. Professor Trimble—he lived over there a great many years—gave a talk before the Ladies' Aid Society of our church, and everybody said it was quite as instructive as going one's self. And then, too, one escaped all the misery of seasickness."
All the time she was busily spreading his bed, while he assisted her with what she described to her husband afterward as "the most charming manner, just as if he enjoyed it." This charming manner, which was the outward expression of an inborn kindliness, won her entirely to his side before the bed-making was over. That any one so frank and pleasant, with such nice boyish eyes, and so rich a colour, should prove untrustworthy, was unbelievable to that part of her which ruled her judgment. And since this ruling part was not reason, but instinct, she possessed, perhaps, as infallible a guide to opinions as ever falls to the lot of erring humanity. "I know he's all right. Don't ask me how I know it, Mr. Peachey," she observed while she brushed her hair for the night; "I don't know how I know it, but I do know it."