"Here," said she gaily, indicating with a wave of her hand her sulky-eyed young cousin, "is a marvel and a wonder—a girl who accepts on faith everything and everybody! My dear Howard, in all probability she will presently even believe in you!" With that she left them, whisked off by a waiting golfer.
The man and the girl appraised each other. The man saw young bread-and-butter with the raw sugar of beauty sprinkled upon it promisingly. What the girl saw was not so much a faultlessly groomed and handsome man as the most beautiful person in the world. And suddenly she was aware that that for which she had been waiting had come. Something divine and wonderful was happening, and there was fire before her eyes and the noise of unloosed winds and great waters in her ears, and her knees trembled and her heart fluttered. A vivid red flamed into her pale cheeks, a soft and trembling light suffused her blue eyes. That happens when the sweet and virginal freshness of youth is brought face to face with the bright shadow of love.
He drew her out of her shyness and made her laugh, and after awhile, when there was dancing, he danced with her. He did not behave to her as other men of Estelle's acquaintance had more than once behaved—as though they bestowed the lordly honor of their society upon her out of the sheer goodness of their hearts and their desire to please Mrs. Baker. Mary Virginia was uncompromising and stiff-necked enough then, and she bored most of her cousin's friends unconsciously. Now this man, as much their superior as the sun is to farthing dips, was exerting himself to please her. That was the one thing Mary Virginia needed to arouse her.
Mrs. Baker admired Mr. Hunter for a grace of manner almost Latin in its charm. If at times he puzzled her, he at least never bored her or anybody else, and for this she praised him in the gates. Her respect for him deepened when she perceived that he never allowed himself to be absorbed or monopolized.
The pleasant widow did not take him too seriously. She only asked that he amuse and interest her. He did both, to a superlative degree. That is why and how he saw so much of the school-girl cousin whose naïvete made him smile, it was so absurdly sincere.
Mrs. Baker was glad enough to have Howard take her charge off her hands occasionally. She thought contact with this fine pagan an excellent thing for the girl who took herself so seriously. She was really fond of Mary Virginia, but she must have found her hand-grenade directness a bit disconcerting at times. She wanted the child's visit to be pleasant, and she considered it very amiable of Howard to help her make it so. She had no faintest notion of danger—to her Mary Virginia was nothing but a child, a little girl one indulged with pickles and pound-cake and the bliss of staying up later than the usual bedtime. As for Hunter, his was the French attitude toward the Young Person; she had heard him say he preferred his flowers in full bloom and his fruit ripe—one then knows what one is getting; one isn't deceived by canker in the closed bud and worm in the green fruit. No, Howard wasn't the sort that hankered for verjuice.
None the less, although Mrs. Baker didn't know it, Mary Virginia was engaged to the godlike Howard when she returned to school. It was to be a state secret until after she was graduated, and in the meantime he was to "make himself worthier of her love." She hadn't any notion he could be improved upon, but it pleased her to hear him say that. Humility in the superman is the ultimate proof of perfection.
The maid who attended her room at school arranged for the receipt of his letters and mailed Mary Virginia's. The maid was sentimental, and delighted to play a part smacking of those dime novels she spoiled her brains with.
The little schoolgirl who was in love with love, and secretly betrothed to a man who had stepped alive out of old knightly romance, walked in the Land of April Rainbows and felt the whole joyous universe suffused with a delicious and quivering glow of light and sound and scent. Surcharged with an emotion that she was irresistibly urged to express, and unable to do so by word of mouth, she was driven to the necessity of putting it down on paper for him. And she put it down in the burning words, the fiery phrases, of those anarchists of art who had intoxicated and obsessed her.
Just a little later,—even a year later—and Mary Virginia could never have written those letters. But now, very ignorant, very innocent, very impassioned, she accomplished a miracle. She was like one speaking an unknown tongue, perfectly sure that the spirit moved her, but quite unable to comprehend what it was that it moved her to say.