Behind this flippant announcement lay a thrilling romance of beauty, coquetry, love, and pride that may interest the amiable reader whose heart is yet young and warm enough to admire the good traits, excuse the follies, and sympathize with the dire misfortunes of a beautiful, thoughtless young girl.
If there was any excuse in the world for what Viola did, it lay in her youth and her thoughtlessness, and because she did not understand at all what a terrible force love is at its best or worst.
She had only heard of the grand passion in its lightest phases as it is pictured by merry young school-girls boasting to each other of their conquests, and it was plain to be seen that “the one with the most strings to her bow” was more envied than any other. They made “nets, not cages.”
She had the tenderest heart in the world. She would not have injured the smallest living thing, yet she had never heard that love is a flame that burns, and that one may carry its scars to the grave. They should have taught her that, those who guided her young life, for she had the fatal gift of beauty coupled with that subtle fascination that draws men’s hearts as plants turn their leaves to the sun.
Slender, lithe, and graceful as a young palm-tree, with the daintiest patrician hands and feet, piquant features, rose-leaf complexion, a cloud of scented dark hair, and a tempting mouth like a rare, red flower, her eyes alone would have made her lovely without the aid of other charms. They were large, almond-shaped, and luminous.
In the shadow they were gray as doves’ wings, in the sunlight blue as ocean’s deeps, at night they were dark like the sky, and flashing like the stars, so that it dazzled you to look at them beneath the thick fringe of the long black lashes. Then her voice, it was so sweet and low, and her laugh so musical, how could any man help but adore?
When she was presented in society there was no one to equal her in grace and charm. Women wondered and envied, men raved and adored. She could have her pick and choice of them all from the multi-millionaire, the gallant soldier, the haughty diplomat, down to the gilded youth who aimed to be the glass of fashion and the mold of form. All alike were Viola Van Lew’s slaves.
And the lovely, thoughtless creature, trained by indiscreet advisers to regard all this as simply her due, flirted demurely while immensely enjoying her conquests, as what fair maiden of eighteen would not, when launched on the glittering, effervescent sea of official life in Washington?
The first man that ever touched her heart was Florian Gay, a handsome, dashing young fellow of the cavalier type who would have become a great artist if he had not been very rich.
He had the divine afflatus, but lacked the incentive to work that poverty confers on the child of genius. Owning a handsome studio on a fashionable street, he trifled with art in a dilettante way, and devoted the most of his time to society.