servants impossible to
her, started valiantly on its familiar road, and tripped but little when
the poor lady realized that neither John Henry nor Virginia was
listening. She was so used to talking for the sake of the sound she made
rather than the impression she produced that her silvery ripple had
become almost as lacking in self-consciousness as the song of a canary.

But Virginia, walking so quietly at her side, was inhabiting at the
moment a separate universe--a universe smelling of honeysuckle and
filled with starry pathways to happiness. In this universe Aunt Ailsey
and her peculiarities, her mother's innocent prattle, and the solid body
of John Henry touching her arm, were all as remote and trivial as the
night moths circling around the lamps. Looking at John Henry from under
her lowered lashes, she felt a sudden pity for him because he was so
far--so very far indeed from being the right man. She saw him too
clearly as he was--he stood before her in all the hard brightness of the
reality, and first love, like beauty, depends less upon the truth of an
outline than it does upon the softening quality of an atmosphere. There
was no mystery for her in the simple fact of his being. There was
nothing left to discover about his great stature, his excellent heart,
and his safe, slow mind that had been compelled to forego even the sort
of education she had derived from Miss Priscilla. She knew that he had
left school at the age of eight in order to become the support of a
widowed mother, and she was pitifully aware of the tireless efforts he
had made after reaching manhood to remedy his ignorance of the
elementary studies he had missed. Never had she heard a complaint from
him, never a regret for the sacrifice, never so much as an idle wonder
why it should have been necessary. If the texture of his soul was not
finely wrought, the proportions of it were heroic. In him the Pendleton
idealism had left the skies and been transmuted into the common
substance of clay. He was of a practical bent of mind and had developed
a talent for his branch of business, which, to the bitter humiliation of
his mother, was that of hardware, with a successful specialty in
bathtubs. Until to-day Virginia had always believed that John Henry
interested her, but now she wondered how she had ever spent so many
hours listening to his talk about business. And with the thought her
whole existence appeared to her as dull and commonplace as those hours.