She lifted her thin, delicate face to the sun, reaching out her arms to it hungrily.
"We must sleep out to-night under the stars, and talk—oh, much talk, out here under the stars!"
During the past year at Grosvenor her frail body had strengthened, revived; she was now firm and vigorous. Only the deep eyes and the lines above them and about the mouth, the curve of the nostril and chin, showed as on a finely chased coin the subtle chiselling of life. And here in the uplands, in the great spaces of earth and sky, the elemental desire of her soul seemed at last wholly appeased, the longing for space and height and light, the longing for deeds and beauty and Peace. At last, after the false roads, the fret and rebellion, she had emerged into the upper air….
"How well the little man rides!" Isabelle remarked as the children went by them on some ponies they had found.
Margaret's face glowed with pride.
"Yes, Ned has improved very fast. He will go to school with the others now…. The doctor has really saved his life—and mine, too," she murmured.
So the two slept out under the stars, as Margaret wished, with dotted heavens close above and vague space all about; and they talked into the morning of past years, of matters that meant too much to them both for daylight speech. Isabelle spoke of Vickers, of the apparent waste of his life. "I can see now," she said, "that in going away with that woman as he did he expressed the real soul of him, as he did in dying for me. He was born to love and to give, and the world broke him. But he escaped!" And she could not say even to Margaret what she felt,—that he had laid it on her to express his defeated life.
They spoke even of Conny. "You received the cards for her wedding?" Margaret asked. "The man is a stockbroker. She is turning her talents to a new field,—money. I hear the wedding was very smart, and they are to live on Long Island, with a yacht and half a dozen motors."
"I thought she would marry—differently," Isabelle observed vaguely, recalling the last time she had seen Conny.
"No! Conny knows her world perfectly,—that's her strength. And she knows exactly what to take from it to suit her. She is a bronze Cleopatra with modern variations. I think they ought to put her figure on the gold eagles as the American Woman Triumphant, ruling her world."