stock over which the naturalists
were still waging their merry war; but Virginia, with a line of earnest
theologians and of saintly self-effacing women at her back, offered as
little resistance as some exquisite plastic material in the teacher's
hands.

Now, as if the same lightning flash which had illuminated the beribboned
diploma in Miss Priscilla's mind had passed to Virginia also, the girl
bit back a retort that was trembling on her lips. "I wonder if she can
be getting to know things?" thought the older woman as she watched her,
and she added half resentfully, "I've sometimes suspected that Gabriel
Pendleton was almost too mild and easy going for a clergyman. If the
Lord hadn't made him a saint, Heaven knows what would have become of
him!"

"Don't try to put notions into Jinny's head, Susan," she said after a
thoughtful pause. "If Oliver were the right kind of young man, he'd give
up this nonsense and settle down to some sober work. The first time I
get a chance I'm going to tell him so."

"I don't believe it will be any use," responded Susan. "Father tried to
reason with him last night, and they almost quarrelled."

"Quarrelled with Cyrus!" gasped the teacher.

"At one time I thought he'd walk out of the house and never come back,"
pursued Susan. "He told father that his sordid commercialism would end
by destroying all that was charming in Dinwiddie. Afterward he
apologized for his rudeness, but when he did so, he said, 'I meant every
word of it.'"

"Well, I never!" was Miss Priscilla's feeble rejoinder. "The idea of
his daring to talk that way when Cyrus had to pay his fare down from New
York."

"Of course father brought it on," returned Susan judicially. "You know
he doesn't like anybody to disagree with him, and when Oliver began to
argue about its being unscrupulous to write history the way people
wanted it, he lost his temper and said some angry things about the
theatre and actors."

"I suppose a great man like your father may expect his family to bow to
his opinions," replied the teacher, for so obscure was her mental
connection between the construction of the future and the destruction of
the past, that she could honestly admire Cyrus Treadwell for possessing
the qualities her soul abhorred. The simple awe of financial success,
which occupies in the American mind the vacant space of the monarchical
cult, had begun already to generate the myth of greatness around Cyrus,
and, like all other myths,