“If I cared for him I couldn’t dissect his qualities as you do.”
“That’s because you are a triumph of the survival of nature and impulse over civilization, in spite of its attempts to sap your freshness. For me, I fear I’m a sophisticated daughter of a critical generation. If I weren’t, I should not hold my judgment so safely in my own keeping, but would surrender it and my heart.”
“There is something about the way you look at him that shocks me. One ought not to let oneself believe all that seems easy to believe.”
“That is your faith, but mine is a different one. You see, I’m a Unitarian,” returned Virginia blithely.
“He will make you love him if you marry him,” sighed Aline, coming back to her obsession.
Virginia nodded eagerly. “In my secret heart that is what I am hoping for, my dear.”
“Unless there is another man,” added Aline, as if alone with her thoughts.
Virginia was irritably aware of a flood of color beating into her cheeks. “There isn’t any other man,” she said impatiently.
Yet she thought of Lyndon Hobart. Curiously enough, whenever she conceived herself as marrying Ridgway, the reflex of her brain carried to her a picture of Hobart, clean-handed, fine of instinct, with the inherited inflections of voice and unconscious pride of caste that come from breeding and not from cultivation. If he were not born to greatness, like his rival, at least he satisfied her critical judgment of what a gentleman should be; and she was quite sure that the potential capacity lay in her to care a good deal more for him than for anybody else she had met. Since it was not on the cards, as Miss Virginia had shuffled the pack, that she should marry primarily for reasons sentimental, this annoyed her in her sophisticated hours.
But in the hours when she was a mere girl when she was not so confidently the heir of all the feminine wisdom of the ages, her annoyance took another form. She had told Lyndon Hobart of her engagement because it was the honest thing to do; because she supposed she ought to discourage any hopes he might be entertaining. But it did not follow that he need have let these hopes be extinguished so summarily. She could have wished his scrupulous regard for the proper thing had not had the effect of taking him so completely out of her external life, while leaving him more insistently than ever the subject of her inner contemplation.