It may be heartbreaking to have your first “serious young man” leave you at the smiles of a pretty widow with blond hair; but, after all, by showing how truly noble you are, you may some day crush your rival and bring your suitor to your knees, crying, “Peccavi!” It’s bad to learn he’s a heartbreaker, but, after all, then there’s all the more incentive to break his heart. You can, whatever happens, bear your suffering nobly, and at the worst you have lots of things, heaps simply, to tell the girls.
But to have your first hero of romance make himself ridiculous—that is the end of all things. Sorrow has then no dignity. A broken heart for a man like that is out of the question. Oh, it’s a bitter thing to think the drama of one’s life a tragedy and have it turn out a low comedy!
Cecilia saw her hero exactly as he was, at that moment, stripped of all adornment.
Glamour died, romance withered away; in the clear fire of her uncompromising young scorn.
She was proving again that man’s only unpardonable crime toward the woman who loves him is to make himself ridiculous.
It was really quite a dramatic little moment. The late hero, now turned mountebank, descended and helped out Felicia and Lydia, radiant in her white and gold attire—and it was only then I saw Drake, who had been sitting stiffly in the back of the cart.
He had taken no part in the pageant. If his temper was impaired, his dignity wasn’t. Sliding downhill was all right, his rigidity seemed to say, but no play acting in his. His mood and Cecilia’s jumped together. Her eyes met his. “I know you now,” her grateful glance seemed to say.
Meantime Mrs. Massingbyrd, lovely as an angel, drifted along the white road.
“It’s breaking the rules of the game,” Felicia said to her, “for you to have taken down your hair.”
“It fell down itself,” answered Lydia the unashamed.