rocter, a carefully expurgated edition of
Shakespeare, with an inscription in the rector's handwriting on the
flyleaf; Miss Strickland's "Lives of the Queens of England"; and several
works of fiction belonging to the class which Mrs. Pendleton vaguely
characterized as "sweet stories." Among the more prominent of these
were "Thaddeus of Warsaw," a complete set of Miss Yonge's novels, with a
conspicuously tear-stained volume of "The Heir of Redclyffe," and a
romance or two by obscure but innocuous authors. That any book which
told, however mildly, the truth about life should have entered their
daughter's bedroom would have seemed little short of profanation to both
the rector and Mrs. Pendleton. The sacred shelves of that bookcase
(which had been ceremoniously presented to her on her fourteenth
birthday) had never suffered the contaminating presence of realism. The
solitary purpose of art was, in Mrs. Pendleton's eyes, to be "sweet,"
and she scrupulously judged all literature by its success or failure in
this particular quality. It seemed to her as wholesome to feed her
daughter's growing fancy on an imaginary line of pious heroes, as it
appeared to her moral to screen her from all suspicion of the existence
of immorality. She did not honestly believe that any living man
resembled the "Heir of Redclyffe," any more than she believed that the
path of self-sacrifice leads inevitably to happiness; but there was no
doubt in her mind that she advanced the cause of righteousness when she
taught these sanctified fallacies to Virginia.

As she rose from her knees, Virginia glanced at her white dress, which
was too crumpled for her to wear again before it was smoothed, and
thought regretfully of Aunt Docia's heart, which invariably gave warning
whenever there was extra work to be done. "I shall have to wear either
my blue lawn or my green organdie this evening," she thought. "I wish I
could have the sleeves changed. I wonder if mother could run a tuck in
them?"

It did not occur to her that she might smooth the dress herself, because
she knew that the iron would be wrested from her by her mother's hands,
which were so knotted and worn that tears came to Virginia's eyes when
she looked at them. She let her mother slave over her because she had
been born into a world where the slaving of mothers was a part of the
natural order, and she had not as yet become independent enough to
question the morality of the commonplace. At any minut