Lansing was silent; she continued: “Go home, Lanty, please——”
Some of the older men had closed around the man, who was just rising to his feet. The first mad impetus of battle was cooling in Lansing’s veins, and just then another girl pushed through the group of men to his side. A slight, graceful creature, with the Lansing blue eyes and fair skin, and sweet lips, she was trembling—white.
“Lanty,” she said, with terror in her eyes, “has he hurt you? You frighten me horribly.”
His eyes rested upon her, self-reproach making them eloquent.
He took the reins from the tall girl’s hand, looking always at the white, appealing face of the other.
“I’m a bit of a fool,” he said; “but he spoke of you two and——” he paused; “I’ll be over to-night,” he said, and rode away.
Vashti Lansing’s hand and wrist were wrenched, and already beginning to swell; the rearing horse had not been so easily subdued after all; but physical pain was a slight thing to her just then.
“Come,” she said to her cousin. “There’s father coming out. Don’t tell him; let some one else. There are always plenty ready to talk.”
So the two girls went into the house, and Sidney Martin stood gazing after them, rapt in the vision of a magnificently made woman curbing and subduing a rearing horse. Surely a type of the eternal divinity of womanhood, striving against the evil that men do.
Sidney Martin, dreamer of dreams, cherisher of ideals, delicate and supra-sensitive, was subjugated for ever by love of that splendid piece of vitality—that woman whom even at this moment he likened to the Venus de Milo—whose magnificent energy and forceful grace recalled so vividly the Winged Victory of Samothrace. With a throb he remembered the beauty of that headless masterpiece, where it stands in the cool greyness of the Louvre, the inexplicable sense of triumphant effort expressed in its heroic pose. How many aspiring souls have gathered fresh courage from its mutilated majesty, where it stands at the head of the wide stairs! And here in the New England hills he had found a woman who might have been its original. The great sculptors had not dreamed then, when they created these Goddesses of stone; even unto this day, it seemed, they walked the earth, radiant in strength and beauty. How fitting that their statues should be given wings, to typify the splendid spirit prisoned in the imperial clay!