ren't, I should not hold my judgment so safely in my own keeping, but
would surrender it and my heart."

"There is something about the way you look at him that shocks me. One
ought not to let oneself believe all that seems easy to believe."

"That is your faith, but mine is a different one. You see, I'm a
Unitarian," returned Virginia blithely.

"He will make you love him if you marry him," sighed Aline, coming back
to her obsession.

Virginia nodded eagerly. "In my secret heart that is what I am hoping
for, my dear."

"Unless there is another man," added Aline, as if alone with her
thoughts.

Virginia was irritably aware of a flood of color beating into her
cheeks. "There isn't any other man," she said impatiently.

Yet she thought of Lyndon Hobart. Curiously enough, whenever she
conceived herself as marrying Ridgway, the reflex of her brain carried
to her a picture of Hobart, clean-handed, fine of instinct, with the
inherited inflections of voice and unconscious pride of caste that come
from breeding and not from cultivation. If he were not born to
greatness, like his rival, at least he satisfied her critical judgment
of what a gentleman should be; and she was quite sure that the
potential capacity lay in her to care a good deal more for him than for
anybody else she had met. Since it was not on the cards, as Miss
Virginia had shuffled the pack, that she should marry primarily for
reasons sentimental, this annoyed her in her sophisticated hours.

But in the hours when she was a mere girl when she was not so
confidently the heir of all the feminine wisdom of the ages, her
annoyance took another form. She had told Lyndon Hobart of her
engagement because it was the honest thing to do; because she supposed
she ought to discourage any hopes he might be entertaining. But it did
not follow that he need have let these hopes be extinguished so
summarily. She could have wished his scrupulous regard for the proper
thing had not had the effect of taking him so completely out of her
external life, while leaving him more insistently than ever the subject
of her inner contemplation.

Virginia's conscience was of the twentieth century and American, though
she was a good deal more honest with herself than most of her sex in
the same social circle. Also she was straightforward with her neighbors
so far as she could reasonably be. But she was not a Puritan in the
least, though she held herself to a more rigid account than she