menu_book Chapter 5

Section 5 of 1916 First Chapters Collection. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. 1916 First Chapters Collection, Section 5, Virginia by Ellen Glasgow. The System. Toward the close of a May afternoon in the year 1884, Miss Priscilla Batt, having learned by heart the lesson in

physical geography she would teach her senior class on the morrow, stood feeding her canary on the little square porch of the Dinwiddie Academy for young ladies. The day had been hot and the fitful wind which had risen in the direction of the river was just beginning to blow in soft gusts under the old mulberry trees in the street and to scatter the loosened petals of syringe

of blossoms in a flowery snow over the grass. For a moment Miss Priscilla turned her flushed face to the scented air while her eyes rested lovingly on the narrow walk edged with pointed bricks and bordered by cow slips and wall flowers which led through the short garden to the three stone steps and the tall iron gate. She was a shapeless yet majestic woman of some 50 years with a large

mottled face in which a steadfast expression of gentle obstinacy appeared to underlie the more avanescent ripples of thought or of emotion. Her severe black silk gown to which she had just changed from her morning dress of alpaca was softened under her full double chin by a knot of lace and a cameo brooch bearing the helmeted profile of palace Athena. On her head she wore a

three-cornered cap trimmed with a ruching of organi and beneath it her thin gray hair still showed a gleam of faded yellow in the sunlight. She had never been handsome but her prodigious size had endowed her with an impressiveness which had passed in her youth and among an indulgent people for beauty only in the last few years had her fleshiness due to rich food which she could not

resist and to lack of exercise for which she had an instinctive aversion begun seriously to inconvenience her. Beyond the wire cage in which the canary spent his involuntarily celibate life an ancient microphila rosebush with a single imperfect bud blooming ahead of summer amid its glossy foliage clamored over a green lattice to the gable pediment of the porch while the delicate

shadows of the leaves rippled like lacework on the gravel below. In the miniature garden where the small spring blossoms strayed from the primbeds into the long feathery grasses there were syringe bushes a little overblown, crepe myrtles not yet in bud, a holly tree veiled in bright green near the iron fence, a flowering almond shrub in late bloom against the shaded side of

the house and where a west wing put out on the left a bower of red and white roses was steeped now in the faint sunshine. At the foot of the three steps ran the sunken moss-edged bricks of High Street and across High Street there floated like windblown flowers the figures of Susan Treadwell and Virginia Pendleton. Opening the rusty gate the two girls tripped with carefully held

flounces up the stone steps in between the cow slips and wall flowers that bordered the walk. Their white lawn dresses were made with the close-fitting sleeves and a narrow waist of the period and their elaborately draped over skirts were looped on the left with graduated bows of light blue ottoman ribbon. They wore no hats and Virginia who was the shorter of the two had fastened a Jacques

Manot rose in the thick dark braid which was wound in a wreath about her head. Above her arched black eyebrows which lent an expression of surprise and animation to her vivid oval face her hair was parted after an earlier fashion under its plaited crown and allowed to break in a mist of little curls over her temples. Even in her pose there was a joyousness in her look which seemed

less the effect of an inward gaiety of mind than of some happy outward accident of form and color. Her eyes very far apart and set in black lashes were of a deep soft blue the blue of wild hyacinths after rain. By her eyes and by an old world charm of personality which she exhaled like a perfume it was easy to discern that she embodied the feminine ideal of the ages. To look at her was to think inevitably of love. For that

end obedient to the powers of life the sentries had formed and colored her as they had formed and colored the wild rose with its whirl of delicate petals. The air of a spoiled beauty which rested not ungracefully upon her was sweetened by her expression of natural simplicity and goodness. For an instant she stood listening in silence to the querulous pipes of the bird and the earnest exhortations of the teacher on the joys of

cage life for both bird and lady. Then plucking the solitary early bud from the macrophila rosebush she tossed it over the railing of the porch on the large and placid bosom of Miss Priscilla. Do leave Dickie alone for a minute she called in a winging soprano voice. At the sound Miss Priscilla dropped the bit of cake she held and turned to lean delightedly over the walk while her face beamed like a beneficent moon through the

shining cloud of rose leaves. Why Ginny I hadn't any idea that you and Susan were there. Her smile included Virginia's companion a tall rather heavy girl with intelligent gray eyes and fair hair cut in a straight fringe across her forehead. She was the daughter of Cyrus Treadwell the wealthiest and therefore the most prominent citizen of the town and she was also as intellectual as the early 80s and the 21,000 inhabitants of Dinwiddie permitted a woman to be.

Her friendship for Virginia had been one of those swift and absorbing emotions which come to women in their school days. The stronger of the two she dominated the other as she dominated every person or situation in life not by charm but by the force of an energetic and capable mind. Though her dress matched Virginia's every detail from the soft folds of tulle at the neck to the fancy striped stockings under the bouffant draperies the different

shapes of the wearers gave to the one gown an air of decorous composure and to the other quaint and appealing grace. Flushed ardent expectant both girls stood now at the beginning of womanhood life was theirs it belonged to them this veiled radiant thing that was approaching. Nothing wonderful has come as yet but tomorrow the day after or next year the miracle would happen and everything would be different. Experience floated in a luminous mystery before them.

The unknown which had borrowed the sweetness and the color of their illusions possessed them like a secret ecstasy and shone in spite of their shyness in their startled and joyous look. Father asked me to take a message over to General Goode explained Virginia with a little laugh as gay as the song of a bird but I couldn't go by without thanking you for the cherry bounce. I made mother drink some of it before dinner and it almost gave her an appetite.

I knew it was what she needed answered Miss Priscilla showing her pleasure by an increasing beam. It was made right here in the house and there's nothing better in the world my poor mother used to say to keep you from running down in the spring but why can't you and Susan come in and sit a while. We'll be straight back in a minute replied Susan before Virginia could answer. I've got a piece of news I want to tell you before anyone else does. Oliver came home last night.

Oliver repeated Miss Priscilla a little perplexed. You don't mean the son of your uncle Henry who went out to Australia. I thought your father had washed his hands of him because he had started play acting or something. Curiosity that devouring passion of the middle-aged worked in her breast and her placid face grew almost intense in expression. Yes that's the one replied Susan. They went to Australia when Oliver was 10 years old and he's now 22. He lost both his parents

about three years ago she added. I know his mother was my cousin returned Miss Priscilla. I lost sight of her after she left Dinwiddie but somebody was telling me the other day that Henry's investments all turned out badly and they came down to real poverty. Sarah Jane was a pretty girl and I was always very fond of her but she was one of the improvident sort that couldn't make two ends meet without tying them into a bow knot. And Oliver must be just like her. After his mother's death

he went to Germany to study and he gave away the little money he had to some student he found starving there in a garret. That was generous commented Miss Priscilla thoughtfully but I should hardly call it sensible. I hope someday Ginny that your father will tell us in a sermon whether there is biblical sanction for immoderate generosity or not. But what does he say asked Virginia softly meaning not the rector but the immoderate young man. Oh Oliver says that there wasn't enough

for both and that the other student is worth more to the world than he is answered Susan. Then of course when he got so poor that he had to pawn his clothes or starve he wrote father an almost condescending letter and said that as much as he hated business he supposed he'd have to come back and go to work. Only he had to for God's sake don't make it tobacco. Wasn't that dreadful. It was extremely impertinent replied Miss Priscilla sternly and to Cyrus of all persons.

I am surprised that he allowed him to come into the house. Oh father doesn't take any of his talk seriously. He calls it starvation foolishness and says that Oliver will get over it as soon as he has a nice little bank account. Perhaps he will he's only 22 you know but just now he said is full of all kinds of new ideas he picked up somewhere abroad. He's as clever as he can be there's no doubt about that and he'd be really good looking too if he didn't have that crooked nose of the

treadwells. Virginia has seen him only once in the street but she's more than half in love with him already. Do come Susan remonstrated Virginia blushing as red as the rose in her hair. It's past six o'clock and the general will have gone if we don't hurry and turning away from the port she ran between the flowering syringe bushes down the path to the gate. Having lost his bit of cake the bird began to pipe shrilly while Miss Priscilla drew a straight

wicker chair. She never used rockers beside the cage and stretching out her feet in their large cloth shoes with elastic sides counted the stitches and an afghan she was knitting in narrow blue and orange strips. In front of her the street trail between cool dim houses which were filled with quiet and from the hall at her back there came a whispering sound as the breeze moved through the window. With that strange power of reflecting the variable moods of humanity which one sometimes

finds in animate objects the face of the old house had borrowed from the face of its mistress the look of cheerful fortitude with which her generation had survived the agony of defeat and the humiliation of reconstruction. After 19 years the academy still bore the scars of war and its battered front. Once it had watched the specter of famine stalk over the grass-grown pavement and it heard the rattle of musketry and the roar of cannon borne on the southern breeze

that now wafted the sounds of the saw and the hammer from an adjacent street. Once it had seen the flight of refugees the overflow of the wounded from hospitals and churches the panic of liberated slaves the steady commotion of the people who were left behind. The sound of the hammer was heard and the sound of the hammer was heard. The sound of the hammer was heard and the sound of the hammer was heard. The sound of the hammer was heard and the sound of the hammer was heard. The sound of the hammer was heard and the sound of the hammer was heard.

And though it would never have occurred to miss Priscilla but either she or her house had borne any relation to history which she regarded strictly as a branch of study and visualized as a list of dates or as a king wearing his crown. She had in fact played a modest yet effective part in the rapidly changing civilization of her age. But events were powerless against the genial heroism in which she was armored and it was characteristic of her as well

as of her race that while she sat now in the midst of encircling battlefields with her eyes on the walk over which she had seen the blood of the wounded drip when they were lifted into her door she should be brooding not over the tremendous tragedies through which she had passed but over the lesson in physical geography she must teach in the morning. Her lips moved gently and the listener had there been one might have heard her murmur the four greater alluvial plains of Asia those of

China and of the Amudarya in temperate regions of the Euphrates and Tigris in the warm temperate of the Indus and Ganges under the tropic with the Nile Valley in Africa were the theaters of the most ancient civilizations known to history or tradition. As she ended Asai escaped her for the instruction of the young was for her a matter not of choice but of necessity with the majority of maiden ladies left destitute in Dinwiddie after the war she had turned naturally to teaching as the only nice and

respectable occupation which required neither preparation of mind nor considerable outlay of money. The fact that she was the single surviving child of a gallant Confederate general who having distinguished himself and his descendants fell at last in the battle of Gettysburg with sufficient recommendation of her abilities in the eyes of her fellow citizens. Had she chosen to paint portraits or to write poems they would have rallied quite as loyally to her support.

Few indeed were the girls born in Dinwiddie since the war who had not learned reading, penmanship up to the right down to the left my dear, geography, history, arithmetic, deportment, and the fine arts in the academy for young ladies. The brilliant military record of the general still shed a legendary luster upon the school and it was earnestly believed that no girl after leaving there with a diploma for good conduct could possibly go wrong or become eccentric in her

later years. To be sure she might remain a trifle weak in her spelling, Miss Priscilla having as she confessed a poor head for that branch of study, but after all as the rector had once remarked good spelling was by no means a necessary accomplishment for a lady and for the rest it was certain that the moral education of a pupil of the academy would be firmly rooted in such fundamental verities as the superiority of man and the aristocratic supremacy of the episcopal church.

From charming Sally Goode now married to Tom Peachey known familiarly as Honest Tom, the editor of the Dinwiddie Bee, to lovely Virginia Pendleton the mark of Miss Priscilla was ineffasibly impressed upon the daughters of the leading families. Remembering this now as she was disposed to do whenever she was knitting without company Miss Priscilla dropped her long wooden needles in her lap and leaning forward in her chair gazed out upon the town with an expression

of childlike confidence of touching innocence. This innocence which belonged to the very essence of her soul had survived both the fugitive joys and the brutal disillusionments of life. Experience could not shatter it for it was the product of a courage that feared nothing except opinions. Just as the town had battled for a principle without understanding it so she was capable of dying for an idea but not of conceiving one. She had suffered everything from the war except the

necessity of thinking independently about it and though in later years memory had become so sacred to her that she rarely indulged in it she still clung passionately to the habits of her ancestors under the impression that she was clinging to their ideals. Little things filled her days the trivial details of the classroom and of the market the small domestic disturbances of her neighbors the moral or mental delinquencies of her two colored servants and even her religious

veneration for the Episcopal Church had crystallized at last into a worship of customs. Today at the beginning of the industrial awakening of the south she who was but the embodied spirit of her race stood firmly rooted in all that was static and all that was obsolete and outgrown in the Virginia of the 80s though she felt as yet merely the vague uneasiness with which her mind recoiled from the first stirrings of change she was beginning to dimly to realize that the car

of progress would move through the quiet streets before the decade was over. The smoke of factories was already succeeding the smoke of the battlefields and out of the ashes of a vanquished idealism the spirit of commercial materialism was born. What was left of the old was fighting valiantly but hopelessly against what had come to the of the new. The two forces filled the streets of Dinwiddie they were embodied in classes and individuals and articles of faith in ideals of

manners the symbol of the one spirit was the memorial wreaths on the battlefields of the other it was the prophetic smoke of the factories. From where she stood in high street she could see this incense to mammon rising above the spires of the churches above the houses and the hovels above the charm and the provincialism which made the Dinwiddie of the 80s and this charm as well as this provincialism appeared to her to be so inalienable a part of the old order with its intrepid faith

in itself with its militant enthusiasm with its courageous battle against industrial evolution with its strength its narrowness its nobility its blindness but looking ahead she could discern only the arid stretch of a civilization from which the last remnant of beauty was banished forever. Already she felt the breaking of those bonds of sympathy which had held the 21,000 inhabitants of Dinwiddie as they had held the entire south solidly knit together in a passive yet effectual

resistance to the spirit of change of the world beyond the borders of Virginia Dinwiddieans knew merely that it was either yankee or foreign and therefore to be pitied or condemned according to the evangelical or the Calvinistic convictions of the observer. Philosophically regarded with the distrust of a people whose notable achievements have not been in the direction of the contemplative virtues and having lived comfortably and created a civilization without

the aid of science they could afford not unreasonably to despise it. It was a quarter of a century since the origin of species had changed the course of the world's thought yet it had never reached them. To be sure there was an old gentleman in Tab Street whose title the professor had been conferred in public recognition of peaceful pursuits but since he never went to church his learning was chiefly effective when used to point a moral from the pulpit. There was also a tradition that General

Goode had been seen reading Plato before the Battle of Seven Pines and this picturesque incident had contributed the distinction of the scholar to the more effulgent glory of the soldier but for purely abstract thought for the thought that did not construct an heroic attitude or concrete image there was as little room in the newer industrial system as there had been in the aristocratic society which preceded it. The world still clung to the belief that the business of humanity was

confined to the preservation of the institutions which existed in the present moment of history and Dinwiddie was only a quiet backwater into which opinions like fashions were born on the current of some tributary stream of thought. Human nature in this town of 21,000 inhabitants differed from human nature in London or in the desert of Sahara mainly in the things that it ate and the manner in which it carried its clothes. The same passion stirred its heart, the same

instincts moved its body, the same contentment with things as they are and the same terror of things as they might be warped its mind. The canary fluted on and from beyond the mulberry trees there floated the droning voice of an aged negros in tatters and a red bandana turban who persuasively offered strawberries to the silent houses. I's got sweet berries, I's got sweet berries, yes my got sweet berries, days from the country. Then suddenly out of nothing it seemed to Miss Priscilla a

miracle occurred. The immemorial calm of High Street was broken by the sound of rapidly moving wheels, not the jingling rattle of market wagons nor the comfortable roll of doctor's buggies and a strange new vehicle belonging to the Dinwiddie livery stables and containing a young man with longish hair and a flowing tie turned the corner by St. James Church and passed over the earthen roadbed in front of the green lattice. As the young man went by he looked up quickly,

smiled with the engaging frankness of a genial nature and lifting his hat with a charming bow revealed to Miss Priscilla's eyes the fact that his hair was thick and dark as well as long and wavy. While he looked at her she noticed also that he had a thin high colored face lighted by a pair of eager dark eyes which lent a glow of impetuous energy to his features. The Treadwell nose she recognized but beneath the Treadwell nose there was a clean shaven boyish mouth which belied the

Treadwell nature in every sensitive curve and outline. I'd have known him anywhere from Susan's description she thought and added suspiciously I wonder why he peered so long around that corner it wouldn't surprise me a bit if those girls were coming back that way. Impelled by her mourning excitement she leaned forward until the ball of orange colored yarn rolled from her short lap and over the polished floor of the porch. Before she got stooped to pick it up she was arrested by the

reappearance of the two girls at the corner beyond which Oliver had gazed so intently. Then as they drew nearer she saw that Virginia's face was pink and her eyes starry under their lowered lashes and inward radiance shone in the girl's look and appeared to shape her soul and body to its secret influence. Miss Priscilla who had known her since the first day she came to school with her lunch from which she refused to be parted tightly tied up in a red and white napkin

felt suddenly that she was a stranger a quality which she had never realized her pupil possessed had risen supreme in an instant over the familiar attributes of her character. So quickly does emotion separate the individual from the inherent soul of the race. Susan who was a little in advance came rapidly up the walk and the older woman greeted her with the words my dear I have seen him yes he just passed us at the corner and I wondered if you were looking

do tell us what you think of him. She sat down on a load chair by the teacher's side while Virginia went over to the cage and stood gazing thoughtfully at the singing bird. Well I don't think his nose spoils him replied Miss Priscilla after a minute but there's something foreign looking about him and I hope Cyrus isn't thinking seriously about putting him into the bank. That was the first thing that occurred to Father answered Susan but Oliver told me last night while we were unpacking

his books he has a quantity of books and he kept them even when he had to sell his clothes that he didn't see to save his life how he was going to stand it. Stand what? inquired Miss Priscilla a trifle tartly for after the vicissitudes of her life it was but natural that she should hesitate to regard so stable an institution as the Dinwiddie Bank as something to be stood. Why I thought a young man couldn't do better than get a place in the bank. Jenny's father was telling

me in the market last Saturday that he wanted his nephew John Henry to start right in there if they could find room for him. Oh of course it's just what John Henry would like said Virginia speaking for the first time and if it's good enough for John Henry it's good enough for Oliver I reckon rejoined Miss Priscilla. Anybody who has mixed with beggars ought to turn up his nose at a respectable bank but he says it's because the bank is so respectable that he doesn't think he could

stand it answered Susan. Virginia had been looking with her rapt gaze down the deserted street quivered as the words as if they had stabbed her but he wants to be a writer Susan she protested a great many very nice people are writers then why doesn't he go about it in a proper way if he isn't ashamed of it asked the teacher and she added reflectively after a pause I wish he'd write a good history of the war one that doesn't deal so much with the north I've almost had to stop teaching United

States history because there's hardly one written now that I would let come inside my doors. He doesn't want to write histories replied Susan father suggested to him at supper last night that if he would try his hand at a history of Virginia and be careful not to put in anything that might offend anybody he could get it taught in every private school in the state but he said he'd be shot first perhaps he's a genius of Virginia in the start of wars geniuses are always different

from other people aren't they I don't know answered Susan doubtfully he talks of things I've never heard of before and he seemed to think that they are the most important things in the world what things asked Virginia breathlessly oh I can't tell you because they are so new but he seems on fire when he talks of them he talks for hours about art and its service to humanity and about going down to the people and uplifting the masses I hope he doesn't mean the Negroes commented miss Priscilla

suspiciously he means the whole world I believe responded Susan he quotes all the time from writers I've never heard of and he laughs at every book he sees in the house yesterday he picked up one of Mrs. Southworth's novels on mother's bureau and asked her how she could allow such immoral stuff in her room she had got it out of the bookcase to lend to Miss Willie Whitlow who was there making my dress but he scolded her so about it that at last Miss Willie went off with Mills essay on

liberty and mother burned all of Mrs. Southworth's that she had in the house Oliver's been so nice to mother that I believe she would make a bonfire of her furniture if he asked her to do it is he really trying to unsettle Miss Willie's mind questioned the teacher anxiously how on earth could she go out sewing by the day if she didn't have her religious convictions that's just what I asked him returned Susan who besides being dangerously clever had

a remarkably level head to keep her balanced but he answered that until people got unsettled they would never move and when I wanted to find out where he thought poor little Miss Willie could possibly be moved to he only got impatient and said that I was trying to bury the principle under the facts we very nearly quarreled over Miss Willie but of course she took the book to please Oliver and couldn't worry through a line of it to save her soul did he say anything about his work what

he wants to do I mean asked Virginia and her voice was so changed with feeling that it gave an emotional quality to the question he wants to write replied Susan his whole heart is in it and when he isn't talking about reaching the people he talks about what he calls technique are you sure it isn't poetry inquired Miss Priscilla humming back like a beat of the tempting sweets of conjecture I've always heard that poetry was the ruination of Poe no it isn't poetry not exactly

at least it's plays answered Susan he talked to me till 12 o'clock last night while we were arranging his books and he told me that he meant to write really great dramas but that America wasn't ready for them yet and that was why he had had to sell his clothes he looked positively starved but he says he doesn't mind starving a while if he can only live up to his ideal well I wonder what his ideal is remarked Miss Priscilla grimly it has something to do with his belief that art can grow

only out of sacrifice said Susan I never heard anybody not even Jenny's father in church talk so much about sacrifice but the rector doesn't talk about sacrifice for the theater retorted the teacher and she added with crushing finality I don't believe there is a particle of sense in it if he's going to write why on earth doesn't he sit straight down and do it why when little miss Amanda Shepherd was left at 60 without a roof over her head she began at once without saying a word

to anybody to write historical novels it does seem funny until you talk with him admitted and soon but he is so much in earnest that when you listen to him you can't help believing in him he is so full of convictions that he convinces you in spite of yourself convictions about what demanded miss Priscilla I don't see how a young man who refuses to be confirmed can have any convictions well he has and he feels just as strongly about them as we do about

ours but how can he possibly feel as strongly about a wrong conviction as we do about a right one insisted the older woman stubbornly for she realized vaguely that they were approaching dangerous ground and set out to check their advance in true dinnwitty fashion which was strictly prohibitive I like a man who has opinions of his own and isn't ashamed to stand up for them said Virginia with a resolution that made her appear suddenly taller not false opinions Jenny

rejoined miss Priscilla and her manner carried them with a bound back to the school room for her mental vision saw in a flash the bourbon diploma for good conduct which her favorite people have borne away from the academy on commencement day two years ago and her shutter seized her lest she should have left a single unprotected breach in the girl's mind through which an unauthorized idea might enter had she trusted too confidently to the fact that Virginia's father was a clergyman and

therefore spiritually armed for the defense and guidance of his daughter Virginia in spite of her gaiety had been what miss Priscilla called a docile pupil meaning one who deferentially submitted her opinions to her superiors and to go through life perpetually submitting her opinions was in the eyes of her parents and her teacher the divinely appointed task of woman her education was founded upon the simple theory that the less a girl knew about life the better prepared she

would be to contend with it knowledge of any sort except the rudiments of reading and writing the geography of countries she would never visit and the dates of battle she would never mention was kept from her as rigorously as if it contained the germs of a contagious disease and this ignorance of anything that could possibly be useful to her was supposed to in some mysterious way to add to her value as a woman and to make her a more desirable companion to a man who either by

experience or by instinct was expected to know his world unlike Susan who in a community which offered few opportunities to women outside of the nursery of the kitchen had been born with the inquiring spirit and would ask questions Virginia had until today accepted with humility the doctrine that a natural curiosity about the universe is the beginning of infidelity the chief object of her upbringing which differed in no essential particular from that of every other well-born

and well-bred southern woman of her day was to paralyze her reasoning faculty so completely that all danger of mental unsettling or even movement was eliminated from her future to solidify the forces of mind into the inherited mode of fixed beliefs was in the opinion of the age to achieve the definite end of all education when the child ceased to wonder before the veil of appearances the battle of orthodoxy with speculation was over and Miss Priscilla felt

that she could rest on her victory with Susan she had failed because the daughter of Cyrus Treadwell was one of those inexplicable variations from ancestral stock over which naturalists were still waging their merry war but Virginia with a line of earnest theologians and of saintly self-effacing women at her back offered as little resistance as some exquisite plastic material in the teacher's hands now as if the same lightning flash which had illuminated the paribin diploma in Miss Priscilla's

mind had passed to Virginia also the girl bit back a retort that was trembling on her lips I wonder if she can be getting to know things thought the older woman as she watched her and she added half resentfully I've sometimes suspected that Gabriel Pendleton was almost too mild and easygoing for a clergyman if the Lord hadn't made him a saint heaven knows what would have become of him don't try to put notions into Ginny's head Susan she said after a thoughtful

pause if Oliver were the right kind of young man he'd give up this nonsense and settle down to some sober work the first time I get a chance I'm going to tell him so I don't believe it will be any use responded Susan father tried to reason with him last night and they almost quarreled quarreled with Cyrus gasped the teacher at one time I thought he'd walk out of the house and never come back pursued Susan he told father that his sordid commercialism would end by destroying all that

was charming and then witty afterward he apologized for his rudeness but when he did so he said I meant every word of it well I never was Miss Priscilla's people rejoined the idea of his daring to talk that way when Cyrus had to pay his fare down from New York of course father brought it on returned Susan judicially you know he doesn't like anybody to disagree with him and when Oliver began to argue about its being unscrupulous to write history the way people wanted it he lost his temper and

said some angry things about the theater and actors I suppose a great man like your father may expect his family to bow to his opinions replied the teacher for so obscure was her mental connection between the construction of the future and the destruction of the past that she could honestly admire Cyrus Treadwell for possessing the qualities her soul abhorred the simple awe of financial success which occupies in the American mind the vacant space of the monarchical cult had begun

already to generate the myth of greatness around Cyrus and like all other myths this owed its origin less to the willful conspiracy of the few than it did to the confiding superstition of the many I hope Oliver won't do anything rash said Susan ignoring Miss Priscilla's tribute he is so impulsive and headstrong but I don't see how he can get on with father at this Virginia broker quivering silence can't you make him careful Susan she asked and without waiting for an answer bent over and

kissed Miss Priscilla on the cheek I must be going now our mother will worry she added before she tripped ahead of Susan down the steps and along the pale shining path to the gate rising from her chair Miss Priscilla leaned over the railing of the porch and gazed wistfully after the girl's vanishing figures if there was ever a girl who looked as if she were cut out for happiness it is Jenny Pendleton she said aloud after a minute a tear welled in her eye and rolling over her cheek

dropped on her bosom from some obscure corner of her memory undefestated by war or by ruin her own youth appeared to take the place of Virginia's she saw herself as she had seen the other an instant before standing flushed and expectant before the untrodden road of the future she heard again the wings of happiness rustling unseen about her and she felt again the great hope which is the challenge that youth flings to destiny life rose before her not as she had found it but as she had once

believed it to be the days when little things had not filtered thoughts returned in the fugitive glow of her memory for she also middle-aged obese cumbered with trivial cares had had her dream of a love that would change and glorify the reality the heritage of woman was hers as well as Virginia's and for the first time standing there she grew dimly conscious of the portion of suffering which nature had allotted to them both from the beginning was it all waiting waiting

as it had been while battles were fought and armies were marching did the future hold this Virginia also would life yield nothing more to that radiant girl than it had yielded to her or to the other women whom she had known strange how the terrible innocence of youth had moved her placid middle age as if it were sadness end of section number five Virginia chapter one the system by Ellen Glasgow