ne of them needed her! She had
outlived her usefulness!

The next afternoon, when Oliver and Jenny had driven off to the station,
she put on her street clothes, and went out to call on Susan, who lived
in a new house in High Street. Mrs. Treadwell, having worn out
everybody's patience except Susan's, had died some five years before,
and the incorrigible sentimentalists of Dinwiddie--there were many of
them--expressed publicly the belief that Cyrus had never been "the same
man since his wife's death." As a matter of fact, Cyrus, who had retired
from active finance in the same year that he lost Belinda, had missed
his business considerably more than he had missed his wife, whose loss,
if he had ever analyzed it, would have resolved itself into the absence
of somebody to bully. But on the very day that he had retired from work
he had begun to age rapidly, and now, standing on Susan's porch, he
suggested to Virginia an orange from which every drop of juice had been
squeezed. Of late he had taken to giving rather lavishly to churches,
with a vague, superstitious hope, perhaps, that he might buy the
salvation he had been too busy to work out in other ways. And so acute
had become his terror of death, Virginia had heard, that after every
attack of dyspepsia he dispatched a check to the missionary society of
the church he attended.

Upstairs, in her bedroom, Susan, who had just come in, was "taking off
her things," and she greeted Virginia with a delight which seemed, in
some strange way, to be both a balm and a stimulant. One thing, at
least, in her life had not altered with middle-age, and that was
Susan's devotion. She was a large, young, superbly vigorous woman of
forty-five, with an abundant energy which overflowed outside of her
household in a dozen different directions. She loved John Henry, but she
did not love him to the exclusion of other people; she loved her
children, but they did not absorb her. There was hardly a charity or a
public movement in Dinwiddie in which she did not take a practical
interest. She had kept her mind as alert as her body, and the number of
books she read had always shocked Virginia a little, who felt that time
for reading was obliged to be time subtracted from more important
duties.

"I've thought of you so much, Jinny, darling. You mustn't let yourself
begin to feel lonely."

Virginia shook her head with a smile, but in spite of her effort not to
appear depressed, there was a touching