Leaning there from the window, with her face lifted to the stars, and her mother's worshipping gaze on her back, she thought of the "happiness" which would be hers in the future: and this "happiness" meant to her only the solitary experience of love. Like all the women of her race, she had played gallantly and staked her world upon a single chance. Whereas a man might have missed love and still have retained life, with a woman love and life were interchangeable terms. That one emotion represented not only her sole opportunity of joy, it constituted as well her single field of activity. The chasm between marriage and spinsterhood was as wide as the one between children and pickles. Yet so secret was this intense absorption in the thought of romance, that Mrs. Pendleton, forgetting her own girlhood, would have been startled had she penetrated that lovely head and discovered the ecstatic dreams that flocked through her daughter's brain. Though love was the one window through which a woman might look on a larger world, she was fatuously supposed neither to think of it nor to desire it until it had offered itself unsolicited. Every girl born into the world was destined for a heritage of love or of barrenness—yet she was forbidden to exert herself either to invite the one or to avoid the other. For, in spite of the fiery splendour of Southern womanhood during the war years, to be feminine, in the eyes of the period, was to be morally passive.
"Your father has come to see your dress, dear," said her mother in the voice of a woman from whom sentiment overflowed in every tone, in every look, in every gesture.
Turning quickly, Virginia met the smiling eyes of the rector—those young and visionary eyes, which Nature, with a wistful irony, had placed beneath beetling brows in the creased and wrinkled face of an old man. The eyes were those of a prophet—of one who had lived his life in the light of a transcendent inspiration rather than by the prosaic rule of practical reason; but the face belonged to a man who had aged before his time under the accumulated stress of physical burdens.
"How do I look, father? Am I pretty?" asked Virginia, stretching her thin young arms out on either side of her, and waiting with parted lips to drink in his praise.
"Almost as beautiful as your mother, and she grows lovelier every day that she lives, doesn't she?"
His adoring gaze, which held the spirit of beauty as a crystal holds the spirit of light, passed from the glowing features of Virginia to the lined and pallid face of his wife. In that gaze there had been no shadow of alteration for thirty years. It is doubtful even if he had seen any change in her since he had first looked upon her face, and thought it almost unearthly in its angelic fairness. From the physical union they had entered into that deeper union of souls in which the body dissolves as the shadow dissolves into the substance, and he saw her always as she had appeared to him on that first morning, as if the pool of sunlight in which she had stood had never darkened around her. Yet to Virginia his words brought a startled realization that her mother—her own mother, with her faded face and her soft, anxious eyes—had once been as young and radiant as she. The love of her parents for each other had always seemed to her as natural and as far removed from the cloudless zone of romance as her own love for them—for, like most young creatures, she regarded love as belonging, with bright eyes and rosy cheeks, to the blissful period of youth.
"I hear John Henry's ring, darling. Are you ready?" asked Mrs. Pendleton.
"In a minute. Is the rose right in my hair?" replied Virginia, turning her profile towards her mother, while she flung a misty white scarf over her shoulders.
"Quite right, dear. I hope you will have a lovely time. I shall sit up for you, so you needn't bother to take a key."
"But you'll be so tired. Can't you make her go to bed, father?"