l will to enforce its desire upon
destiny. She would win back the romance and the beauty of living at the
cost of prudence, at the cost of practical comforts, at the cost, if
need be, of those ideals of womanly duty to which the centuries had
trained her! For eight years she had hardly thought of herself, for
eight years she had worked and saved and planned and worried, for eight
years she had given her life utterly and entirely to Oliver and the
children--and the result was that he was happier with Abby--with Abby
whom he didn't even admire--than he was with the wife whom he both
respected and loved! The riddle not only puzzled, it enraged her. Though
she was too simple to seek a psychological answer, the very fact that it
existed became an immediate power in her life. She forgot the lateness
of the evening, she forgot the children who were anxiously watching for
her return. The forces of character, which she had always regarded as
divinely fixed and established, melted and became suddenly fluid. She
wasn't what she had been the minute before--she wasn't even, she began
dimly to realize, what she would probably be the minute afterwards. Yet
the impulse which governed her now was as despotic as if it had reigned
in undisputed authority since the day of her birth. She knew that it was
a rebel against the disciplined and moderate rule of her conscience, but
this knowledge, which would have horrified her had she been in a normal
mood, aroused in her now merely a breathless satisfaction at the
spectacle of her own audacity. The natural Virginia had triumphed for an
instant over the Virginia whom the ages had bred.

At home she found Oliver waiting for supper, and the three children in
tears for fear she should decide to stay out forever.

"Oh, mother, we thought you'd gone away never to come back," sobbed
Lucy, throwing herself into her arms, "and what would little Jenny have
done?"

"Where in the world have you been, Virginia?" asked Oliver, a trifle
impatiently, for he was not used to having her absent from the house at
meal hours. "I was afraid somebody had been taken ill at the rectory, so
I went around to inquire."

"No, nobody was ill," answered Virginia quietly. Though her resolution
made her tremble all over, it did not occur to her for an instant that
even now she might recede from it. As the rector had gone to the war, so
she was going now to battle with Abby. She was afraid, but that quality
which had made th