hers even on the surface. In the month that Jenny spent in Dinwiddie,
she organized a number of societies and clubs for the improvement of
conditions among working girls, and in spite of the intense heat (the
hottest spell of the summer came while she was there), she barely
allowed herself a minute for rest or for conversation with her mother.

"If you would only go to the mountains, mother," she remarked the
evening before she left. "I am sure it isn't good for you to stay in
Dinwiddie during the summer."

"I am used to it," replied Virginia a little stubbornly, for it seemed
to her at the moment that she would rather die than move.

"But you ought to think of your health. What does father say about it?"

A contraction of pain crossed Virginia's face, but Jenny, whose vision
was so wide that it had a way of overlooking things which were close at
hand, did not observe it.

"He hasn't said anything," she answered, with a strange stillness of
voice.

"I thought he meant to take you to England, but I suppose his plays are
keeping him in New York."

Rising from her chair at the table--they had just finished
supper--Virginia reached for a saucer and filled it with ice cream from
a bowl in front of her.

"I think I'll send Miss Priscilla a little of this cream," she remarked.
"She is so fond of strawberry."

The next day Jenny went, and again the silence and the loneliness
settled upon the house, to which Virginia clung with a morbid terror of
change. Had her spirit been less broken, she might have made the effort
of going North as Jenny had urged her to do, but when her life was over,
one place seemed as desirable as another, and it was a matter of
profound indifference to her whether it was heat or cold which afflicted
her body. She was probably the only person in Dinwiddie who did not hang
out of her window during the long nights in search of a passing breeze.
But with that physical insensibility which accompanies prolonged torture
of soul, she had ceased to feel the heat, had ceased even to feel the
old neuralgic pain in her temples. There were times when it seemed to
her that if a pin were stuck into her body she should not know it. The
one thing she asked--and this Life granted her except during the four
weeks of Jenny's visit--was freedom from the need of exertion, freedom
from the obligation to make decisions. Her housekeeping she left now to
the servants, so she was spared the daily harassing choices of th