“Never,” agreed Virginia, with the mental reservations that usually accompanied her skeptical smile. She was getting at her fiance from a novel point of view.
“And so modest, with all his strength and courage.’,
“It’s almost a fault in him,” she murmured.
“The woman that marries him will be blessed among women.”
“I count it a great privilege,” said Miss Balfour absently, but she pulled up with a hurried addendum: “To have known him.”
“Indeed, yes. If one met more men like him this would be a better world.”
“It would certainly be a different world.”
It was a relief to Aline to talk, to put into words the external skeleton facts of the surging current that had engulfed her existence since she had turned a corner upon this unexpected consciousness of life running strong and deep. Harley was not a confidant she could have chosen under the most favorable circumstances, and her instinct told her that in this matter he was particularly impossible. But to Virginia Balfour—Mrs. Mott had to leave early to preside over the Mesa Woman’s Club, and her friend allowed herself to be persuaded to stay longer—she did not find it at all hard to talk. Indeed, she murmured into the sympathetic ear of this astute young searcher of hearts more than her words alone said, with the result that Virginia guessed what she herself had not yet quite found out, though her heart was hovering tremblingly on the brink of discovery.
But Virginia’s sympathy for the trouble fate had in store for this helpless innocent consisted with an alert appreciation of its obvious relation to herself. What she meant to discover was the attitude toward the situation of one neither particularly innocent nor helpless. Was he, too, about to be “caught in the coil of a God’s romances,” or was he merely playing on the vibrating strings of an untaught heart?
It was in part to satisfy this craving for knowledge that she wrote Ridgway a note as soon as she reached home. It said: