Virginia hesitated for another minute, then, with her face red with shame, she said: "He asked me to prove it by—kissing him—kissing him of my own free will. I hesitated, I think. Yes, I hesitated, but I heard the steps of the men in the hall below at the foot of the stairs. I thought of the money, Mrs. Boyd, and I kissed him."
"You did?"
"Yes. I did—there, in his room!"
"Well, I'm glad you told me that," Ann breathed, deeply. "I think I understand it better now. I understand how you feel."
"So you see, all that's what I'd have to tell Luke King," Virginia said; "and I'll never do it—never on this earth. I want him always to think of me as he does right now."
Ann locked her big hands in her lap and bent forward.
"I see my greatest trouble is going to lie with you," she said. "You are conscientious. Millions of women have kept worse things than that from their husbands and never lost a wink of sleep over them, but you seem to be of a different stripe. I think Luke King is too grand a man to hold that against you, under all the circumstances. I think so, but I don't know men any better than they know women, and I'm not going to urge you one way or the other. I thought my easy-going husband would do me justice, but he couldn't have done it to save his neck from the loop. In my opinion there never will be any happy unions between men and women till men quit thinking so much about the weakness of women's bodies and so little of the strength of their souls. The view you had that night of the dark valley of a living death, and your escape from it, has lifted you into a purity undreamt of by the average woman. If Luke King's able to comprehend that, he may get him a wife on the open mountain-top; if not, he can find her in the bushes at the foot. He'll obey his natural law, as you and I will ours."
[XXIX]
In dire dread of facing the anger of his father, who was expected back from Savannah, for having sold the horse which the Colonel himself was fond of riding, and being in the lowest dregs of despondency and chagrin over the humiliating turn his affair with Virginia had taken, Langdon Chester packed his travelling-bag and hurried off to Atlanta.
There he had a middle-aged bachelor cousin, Chester Sively, who was as fair an example as one could well find of the antebellum Southern man of the world carried forward into a new generation and a more active and progressive environment. Fortunately for him, he had inherited a considerable fortune, and he was enabled to live in somewhat the same ease as had his aristocratic forebears. He had a luxurious suite of rooms in one of the old-fashioned houses in Peachtree Street, where he always welcomed Langdon as his guest, in return for the hospitality of the latter during the hunting season on the plantation.