o I was," reflected Gabriel, who, though both of them
would have been indignant at the suggestion, was as putty in the hands
of his wife. "Well, I'll look into the bank on Cyrus after I've paid my
sick calls."

With that they parted, Gabriel going on to visit a bedridden widow in
the Old Ladies' Home, while Mrs. Pendleton and Virginia turned down a
cross street that led toward the market. At every corner, it seemed to
Virginia, middle-aged ladies, stout or thin, wearing crape veils and
holding small black silk bags in their hands, sprang out of the shadows
of mulberry trees, and barred their leisurely progress. And though
nothing had happened in Dinwiddie since the war, and Mrs. Pendleton had
seen many of these ladies the day before, she stopped for a sympathetic
chat with each one of them, while Virginia, standing a little apart,
patiently prodded the cinders of the walk with the end of her sunshade.
All her life the girl had been taught to regard time as the thing of
least importance in the universe; but occasionally, while she listened
in silence to the liquid murmur of her mother's voice, she wondered
vaguely how the day's work was ever finished in Dinwiddie. The story of
Docia's impertinence was told and retold a dozen times before they
reached the market. "And you really mean that you can't get rid of her?
Why, my dear Lucy, I wouldn't stand it a day! Now, there was my Mandy.
Such an excellent servant until she got her head turned----" This from
Mrs. Tom Peachey, an energetic little woman, with a rosy face and a
straight gray "bang" cut short over her eyebrows. "But, Lucy, my child,
are you doing right to submit to impertinence? In the old days, I
remember, before the war----" This from Mrs. William Goode, who had been
Sally Peterson, the beauty of Dinwiddie, and who was still superbly
handsome in a tragic fashion, with a haunted look in her eyes and masses
of snow-white hair under her mourning bonnet. Years ago Virginia had
imagined her as dwelling perpetually with the memory of her young
husband, who had fallen in his twenty-fifth year in the Battle of Cold
Harbor, but she knew now that the haunted eyes, like all things human,
were under the despotism of trifles. To the girl, who saw in this
universal acquiescence in littleness merely the pitiful surrender of
feeble souls, there was a passionate triumph in the thought that her own
dreams were larger than the actuality that surrounded her. Youth's scorn
of the na