t year no cause even for apprehension.
The libertine had always been absent from his nature; and during all the
years of their marriage he had, as Susan put it, hardly so much as
looked at another woman. Whatever came between them, it would not be
physical passion, but a far subtler thing.

Going to his desk, she took up a photograph of Margaret Oldcastle and
studied it for a moment--not harshly, not critically, but with a pensive
questioning. It was hardly a beautiful face, but in its glowing
intellectuality, it was the face of a woman of power. So different was
the look of noble reticence it wore from that of the conventional type
of American actress, that while she gazed at it Virginia found herself
asking vaguely, "I wonder why she went on the stage?" The woman was not
a pretty doll--she was not a voluptuous enchantress--the coquetry of the
one and the flesh of the other were missing. If the stories Virginia had
heard of her were to be trusted, she had come out of poverty not by the
easy steps of managers' favours, but by hard work, self-denial, and
discipline. Though Virginia had never seen her, she felt instinctively
that she was an "honest woman."

And yet why did this face, which had in it none of the charms of the
seductress, disturb her so profoundly? She was too little given to
introspection, too accustomed to think always in concrete images, to
answer the question; but her intuition, rather than her thought, made
her understand dimly that the things she feared in Margaret Oldcastle
were the qualities in which she herself was lacking. Whatever power the
woman possessed drew its strength and its completeness from a source
which Virginia had never recognized as being necessary or even
beneficent to love. After all, was it not petty and unjust in her to be
hurt by Oliver's friendship for a woman who had been of such tremendous
assistance to him in his work? Had he not said a hundred times that she
had succeeded in making his plays popular without making them at the
same time ridiculous?

Putting the photograph back in its place on the desk, she turned away
and began walking again over the strip of carpet which led from the door
to the window. In the yard the dried stalks of last year's flowers
looked so lonely in the midst of the dirty snow, that she felt a sudden
impulse of sympathy. Poor things, they had outlived their usefulness.
The phrase occurred to her again, and she remembered how often her
father had