he _had_ used his railroad to make a
fortune--well, but for him where would the Dinwiddie and Central be
to-day if not in the junk shop? Where would the lumber market be? the
cotton market? the tobacco market? For around Cyrus, standing alone and
solitary on his height, there had gathered the great illusion that
makes theft honest and falsehood truth--the illusion of Success; and
simple John Henry Pendleton, who, after nineteen years of poverty and
memory, was bereft alike of classical pedantry and of physical comforts,
had grown a little weary of the endless lip-worship of a single moment
in history. Granted even that it was the greatest moment the world had
seen, still why couldn't one be satisfied to have it take its place
beside the wars of the Spartans and of the ancient Britons? Perpetual
mourning was well enough for ladies in crape veils and heroic gentlemen
on crutches; but when your bread and meat depended not upon the graves
you had decorated, but upon the bathtubs you had sold, surely something
could be said for the Treadwell point of view.

As Virginia could find no answer to this remark, the three stood in
silence, gazing dreamily, with three pairs of Pendleton eyes, down
toward the site of the old slave market. Directly in their line of
vision, an over-laden mule with a sore shoulder was straining painfully
under the lash, but none of them saw it, because each of them was
morally incapable of looking an unpleasant fact in the face if there was
any honourable manner of avoiding it. What they beheld, indeed, was the
most interesting street in the world, filled with the most interesting
people, who drove happy animals that enjoyed their servitude and needed
the sound of the lash to add cheer and liveliness to their labours.
Never had the Pendleton idealism achieved a more absolute triumph over
the actuality.

"Well, we must go on," murmured Mrs. Pendleton, withdrawing her
visionary gaze from the hot street littered with fruit rinds and
blood-stained papers from a neighbouring butcher shop. "It was lovely
to have this glimpse of you, John Henry. What nice bathtubs you have!"
Smiling her still lovely smile into the young man's eyes, she proceeded
on her leisurely way, while Virginia raised the black silk sunshade over
her head. In front of them they could see long rows of fish-carts and
vegetable stalls around which hovered an army of eager housekeepers. The
social hours in Dinwiddie at that period were the ea