f stern
loveliness floating into the room. With the winter's glow in her cheeks
and eyes and the bronze sheen on her splendid hair, which was brushed in
rippling waves from her forehead and coiled in a severely simple knot on
her neck, she might have been a wandering goddess, who had descended,
with immortal calm, to direct the affairs of the household. Her white
shirtwaist, with its starched severity, suited her austere beauty and
her look of almost superhuman composure.

"Take off your hat, darling, and lie down on the couch while I finish
Lucy's packing," said Virginia, when she had sent the servant downstairs
to pay the cabman. Her soul was in her eyes while she watched Jenny
remove her plain felt hat, with its bit of blue scarf around the
crown--a piece of millinery which presented a deceptive appearance of
inexpensiveness--and pass the comb through the shining arch of her hair.

"I am so sorry, mother dear, I couldn't come before, but there were some
important lectures I really couldn't afford to miss. I am specializing
in biology, you know."

Her manner, calm, sweet, and gently condescending, was such as she might
have used to a child whom she loved and with whom she possessed an
infinite patience. One felt that while talking, she groped almost
unconsciously for the simplest and shortest words in which her meaning
might be conveyed. She did not lie down as Virginia had suggested, but
straightening her short skirt, seated herself in an upright chair by the
table and crossed her slender feet in their sensible, square-toed shoes.
While she gazed at her, Virginia remembered, with a smile, that Harry
had once said his sister was as flawless as a geometrical figure, and he
couldn't look at her without wanting to twist her nose out of shape. In
spite of her beauty, she was not attractive to men, whom she awed and
intimidated by a candid assumption of superiority. For Lucy's
conscienceless treatment of the male she had unmitigated contempt. Her
sister, indeed, had she not been her sister, would have appeared to her
as an object for frank condemnation--"one of those women who waste
themselves in foolish flirtations." As it was, loving Lucy, and being a
loyal soul, with very scientific ideas of her own responsibility for her
sister as well as for that abstract creature whom she classified as "the
working woman," she thought of Lucy tenderly as a "dear girl, but
simple." Her mother, of course, was, also, "simple"; but, th