ndestructible. People, of course, grew more practical and less intense
as they left youth farther behind them; and though this misty principle
would have dissolved at once had she applied it to herself (for she
became more sentimental as she approached middle-age), behind any
suspicious haziness of generalization there remained always the sacred
formula, "Men are different." Once, when a sharp outbreak of the primal
force had precipitated a scandal in the home of one of her neighbours,
she had remarked to Susan that she was "devoutly thankful that Oliver
did not have that side to his nature."

"It must be a disagreeable side to live with," Susan, happily married to
John Henry, and blissfully expectant of motherhood, had replied, "but as
far as I know, Oliver never had a light fancy for a woman in his
life--not even before he was married. I used to tell him that it was
because he expected too much. Physical beauty by itself never seemed to
attract him--it was the angel in you that he first fell in love with."

A glow of pleasure flushed Virginia's sharpened features, mounting to
the thin little curls on her forehead. These little curls, to which she
sentimentally clung in spite of the changes in the fashions, were a
cause of ceaseless worry to Lucy, who had developed into a "stylish"
girl, and would have died sooner than she would have rejected the
universal pompadour of the period. It was the single vanity that
Virginia had ever permitted herself, this adhering at middle-age to the
quaint and rather coquettish hairdressing of her girlhood: and Fate had
punished her by threading the little curls with grey, while Susan's
stiff roll (she had adopted the newer mode) remained bravely flaxen. But
Susan was one of those women who, lacking a fine fair skin and defying
tradition, are physically at their best between forty and fifty.

"Oliver used to be so romantic," said Virginia, as she had said so often
to herself, while the glow paled slowly from her cheeks, leaving them
the colour of faded rose-leaves.

"Not so romantic as you were, Jinny."

"Oh, I am still," she laughed softly. "Lucy says I take more interest in
her lovers now than she does," and she added after a minute, "Girls are
so different to-day from what they used to be--they are so much less
sentimental."

"But I thought Lucy was. She has enough flirtations for her age, hasn't
she?"

"She has enough attention, of course--for the funny part is that, though
s