logic of facts with something of the
exalted obstinacy with which faith has resisted the arguments of
philosophy. Like all young and inexperienced creatures, she was
possessed by the feeling that there exists a magnetic current of
attraction between desire and the object which it desires. "Something
told" her that she was meant for happiness, and the voice of this
"something" was more convincing than the chaotic march of phenomena.
Sorrow, decay, death--these appeared to her as things which must happen
inevitably to other people, but from which she should be forever
shielded by some beneficent Providence. She thought of them as vaguely
as she did of the remote tragedies of history. They bore no closer
relation to her own life than did the French Revolution or the beheading
of Charles the First. It was natural, if sad, that Miss Willy Whitlow
should fade and suffer. The world, she knew, was full of old people, of
weary people, of blighted people; but she cherished passionately the
belief that these people were all miserable because, somehow, they had
not chosen to be happy. There appeared something positively
reprehensible in a person who could go sighing upon so kind and
beautiful a planet. All things, even joy, seemed to her a mere matter of
willing. It was impossible that any hostile powers should withstand the
radiant energy of her desire.

Leaning there from the window, with her face lifted to the stars, and
her mother's worshipping gaze on her back, she thought of the
"happiness" which would be hers in the future: and this "happiness"
meant to her only the solitary experience of love. Like all the women of
her race, she had played gallantly and staked her world upon a single
chance. Whereas a man might have missed love and still have retained
life, with a woman love and life were interchangeable terms. That one
emotion represented not only her sole opportunity of joy, it constituted
as well her single field of activity. The chasm between marriage and
spinsterhood was as wide as the one between children and pickles. Yet so
secret was this intense absorption in the thought of romance, that Mrs.
Pendleton, forgetting her own girlhood, would have been startled had she
penetrated that lovely head and discovered the ecstatic dreams that
flocked through her daughter's brain. Though love was the one window
through which a woman might look on a larger world, she was fatuously
supposed neither to think of it nor to desire it