“Oh,” she said, “the joy of youth, the joy! Old Madame d’Arblay, the Louisville milliner, devised that pompon head-dress out of her own cleverness, and I remember my old Aunt Polly Ann Love tried to talk her down on the price. How it comes back, the intoxication of it, and the living. Drink deep, little Mab, it never offers twice. I seemed to have divined it never would be again.”
The girl looked from one woman to the other. Molly still pursued this thing called adulation, and Mrs. Leroy, big-hearted, simple-souled as she was, looked yearningly back on that which was gone.
Was this all, then? Was life forever after empty, except as with Mrs. Leroy, of duties that occupied but did not satisfy? And what of women who are neither beauties nor belles? What has life to offer them?
A vast depression came over the girl. And was this all? Both women bore witness that it was.
“I heard tell in those days,” Molly was saying to Mrs. Leroy, “of a dozen men in the South you might have married. How did you come”—curiously—“in the end to marry Captain Leroy, so much older, and so quiet, and—er—”
Charlotte was too simple to resent the question, which to her meant only affectionate interest. Besides, she was an egotist, and livened under talk of herself. She had no concealment; indeed, had she been cognizant of any skeleton in the family closet, it must speedily have lost its gruesomeness to her, so constantly would she have it out, annotating its anatomy to any who showed interest.
“Because he came to us in our trouble,” said Charlotte, “to mother and me when father died. He was shot, my father, you know, in a political quarrel on the street in Lexington, the year before the war. And Captain Georges came to us. We’d always known him. His father and my Uncle Spottswood Love operated the first brandy distillery in Kentucky. Captain Georges had brought me pretty things from New Orleans and Paris all my life. I meant never to marry, then; I’d been unhappy. But it turned out we were poor, and so when Georges said for me to marry him that he might care for mother and me, why—”
“Oh,” breathed Alexina. It was denunciation. Certain scenes of childhood had burned into her memory, which she had interpreted later. Molly had not loved daddy, either.
“No one was ever so good, so nobly, generously good to a woman as Georges has been to me,” Mrs. Leroy was saying; “and even in our poverty he and Willy have managed, and kept it somehow from me, and long, oh, long ago, I came to love him dearly.”
The young arraigner, hearing, gazed unconvinced. She pushed the weight of her hair back off her forehead, as she always did when impatient. “Came to love him dearly.” With that mere affection which grows from association, and dependence and habit.