_ CHAPTER V. MARGARET
As he inserted his latch-key in the old-fashioned lock, Stephen remembered that his mother had instructed him not to be late because Margaret Blair was coming to spend the evening. "It takes you so long to change that I believe you begin to dream as soon as you go to your room," she had added; and while he made his way hurriedly and softly up the stairs, he wondered how he could have so completely forgotten the girl whom he had always thought of vaguely as the one who would some day--some remote day probably--become his wife. He was not in love with Margaret, and he believed, though one could never be sure, that she was not in love with him--that her fancy, if a preference so modest could be called by so capricious a name, was for the handsome young clergyman who read Browning with her every Tuesday afternoon. But he was aware also that she would marry him if he asked her; he knew that the hearts of four formidable parents were set on the match; and in his past experience his mother's heart had invariably triumphed over his less intrepid resolves. When Janet had said that the war had "spoiled" this carefully nurtured sentiment, she had described the failure with her usual accuracy. If he had never gone to France, he would certainly have married Margaret in his twenty-fourth year, and by this time they would have begun to rear a promising family. For he was the offspring of tradition; and the seeds of that strange flower, which some adventurous ancestor had strewn in his soul, could not have broken through the compact soil in which he had grown. If he had never felt the charm of the unknown, he would have remained satisfied to accept convention for romance; if he had never caught a glimpse of wider horizons, he would have restricted his vision contentedly to the tranquil current of James River. But the harm had been done, as Janet said, the exotic flower had sprung up, and he had learned that the family formula for happiness could not suffice for his needs. He craved something larger, something wider, something deeper, than the world in which his fathers had lived. In that first year after his return he had felt that antiquated traditions were closing about him and shutting out the air, just as he had felt at times that the fine old walls of the house were pressing together over his head. At such moments the sense of suffocation, of smothering for lack of space in which to breathe, had driven him like a hunted creature out into the streets. It was not long before he discovered that certain persons brought this feeling of oppression more quickly than others, that the presence of Margaret or of his parents stifled him, while Corinna made him feel as if a window had been suddenly flung open. The doctors, of course, had talked in scientific terms of diseased nerves and a specialist whom his mother had called in on one occasion had tried first to probe into the secrets of his infancy and afterward to analyse his symptoms away. But the war, among other lessons, had taught him that one must not take either one's sensations or scientific opinion too seriously, and he had contrived at last to turn the whole thing into the kind of family joke that his father could understand. Outwardly he took up his life as before; if the penalty of depression was psychoanalysis, it was worth while to pretend at least to be gay. Yet beneath the surface there was, he told himself, a profound revulsion from everything that he had once enjoyed and loved--an apathy of soul which made him a moving shadow in a universe of stark unrealities. He knew that he was sinking deeper and deeper into this morass of indifference; he realized, at times vividly, that his only hope was in change, in a complete break with the past and a complete plunge into the future. His reason told him this, and yet, though he longed passionately to let himself go--to make the wild dash for freedom--his disabled will, the nervous indecision from which he suffered, prevented both his liberation and his recovery. There were hours of grayness when he told himself that he had neither the fortitude to endure the old nor the energy to embrace the new. In his nature, as in his environment, two opposing spirits were struggling: the realistic spirit which saw things as they were and the romantic spirit which saw things as they ought to be. It was the immemorial battle, brought by circumstances to a crisis, between the race and the individual, between tradition and adventure, between philosophy and experience, between age and youth.
Yes, it was "something different" that he craved. He had known Margaret too long; there was no surprise for him in any gesture that she made, in any word that she uttered. They had drunk too deeply of the same springs to offer each other the attraction of mystery, the charm of the unusual. He was familiar with every opinion she had inherited and preserved, with every dress she had worn, with every book she had read. As a whole she embodied his ideal of feminine perfection. She was gentle, lovely and unselfish; she never asked unnecessary questions, never exacted more of one's time than one cared to give, never interfered with more important, if not more admirable, pursuits. That was the rarest of combinations, he knew--the delightful mingling of every virtue he held desirable in woman--and yet, rare and delightful as he acknowledged it to be, he was obliged to confess that it awakened not the faintest quiver of his pulses. Margaret aroused in him every sentiment except the one of interest; and he had begun to realize that at the moments when he admired her most, it was often impossible for him to make conversation. It had never occurred to him to wonder if their association had become emotionally unprofitable to her also, for in accordance with the system under which he lived, he had assumed that woman's part in love was as heroically passive as it had been in religion. What he had asked himself again and again was why, since she was so perfectly desirable in every way, he had never fallen in love with her? Until this evening he had always told himself that it would come right in the end, that he was in his own phrase simply "playing for time." Margaret was handsomer, if less piquant, than Patty Vetch. She possessed every quality he had found lacking in poor Patty; yet he admitted ruefully that he felt the vague sense of disappointment which follows when one is offered a dish of one's choice and finds that the expected flavour is missing.
There was a peremptory knock at his door, and his mother looked in reproachfully. "You must hurry, Stephen, or everything will be burned to a cinder."
"I am sorry," he replied with compunction, "I didn't realize that I was late."
Her expression was stern but kind. "If you could only learn to be punctual, dear. Of course while we felt that you were not quite yourself, we tried not to worry about it. But you have been home so long now that you ought to be able to drop back into your old habits."
She was right, he knew; the exasperating thing about her was that she was always right. It was reasonable, it was logical, that after two years he should be able to drop back into his old habits of life; and yet he realized, with the intensity of revolt, that these habits represented for him the form of bondage from which he desired passionately to escape. He could not oppose his mother, and the knowledge that he could not oppose her increased his annoyance. As far back as he could remember she had governed her household as a benevolent despot; and the fact that she lived entirely for others appeared to him to have endowed her with some unfair advantage. Her very unselfishness had developed into an unscrupulous power to ruin their lives. How was it possible to weigh one's personal preferences against an irresistible force which was actuated simply and solely by the desire for one's good? Who could withstand a virtue which had encased itself in the first principle of religion--which gave all things and demanded nothing except the sacrifice of one's immortal soul?
"I am ready now," he said; and then as they went downstairs together, he added contritely: "After this I'll try to remember."
"I hope you will, my dear. It vexes your father." Even in his childhood Stephen had understood that his father's "vexation" existed only as an instrument of correction in the hands of his mother. Though he had discovered by the time he was three years old that the image was nothing more than a nursery bugaboo, there were occasions still when the figure was solemnly dressed up and paraded before his eyes.
"So it's the Dad, bless him!" he exclaimed, for if he loved his mother in spite of her virtues, he joined heartily in the family worship of the head of the house. "Well, he has had a word with Margaret anyway, and he ought to thank me for that."
"Dear Margaret," murmured Mrs. Culpeper, "she is looking so sweet to-night."
That Margaret was looking very sweet indeed, Stephen acknowledged as soon as he entered the room, where the firelight suffused the Persian rugs (which had replaced the earlier Brussels carpet woven in a mammoth floral design), the elaborately carved and twisted rosewood chairs and sofas, upholstered in ruby-coloured brocade, the few fine old pieces of Chippendale or Heppelwhite, the massive crystal chandelier, and the precise copies of Italian paintings in gorgeous Florentine frames. Here and there hung a family portrait, one of Amanda Culpeper, a famous English beauty, with a long nose and a short upper lip, not unlike Victoria's. This painting, which was supposed to be by Sir Joshua Reynolds, was a source of unfailing consolation to Victoria, though Stephen preferred the Sully painting of his grandmother, Judith Randolph, who reminded him in some subtle way of Margaret Blair. In his childhood he had believed this drawing-room to be the most beautiful place on earth, and he never entered it now without a feeling of regret for a shattered illusion.
As he took Margaret's hand her expression of intelligent sympathy went straight to his heart; and he told himself emphatically that after all the familiar graces in women were the most lovable. She was a small fragile girl, with a lovely oval face, nut-brown hair that grew in a "widow's peak" on her forehead, and the prettiest dark blue eyes in the world. Her figure drooped slightly in the shoulders, and was, as Mary Byrd pointed out in her dashing way, "without the faintest pretence to style." But if Margaret lacked "style," she possessed an unconscious grace which seemed to Stephen far more attractive. It was delightful to watch the flowing lines of her clothes, as if, he used to imagine in a fanciful strain, she were poured out of some slender porcelain vase. Her dress to-night, of delicate blue crepe, began slightly below the throat and reached almost to her ankles. It was a fashion which he had always admired; but he realized that it gave Margaret, who was only twenty-two, a quaint air of maturity.
"I am so sorry I am late," he said, "but I had to go back to the office for a paper I'd forgotten." It was the truth as far as it went; and yet because it was not the whole truth, because his delay was due, not to his return for the paper, but to his meeting with Patty Vetch in the Square, his conscience pricked him uncomfortably. When deceit was so easy it ceased to be a temptation.
She looked at him with an expression of guileless sympathy. "After working all day I should think you would be tired," she murmured. That was the way she would always cover up his errors, large or small, he knew, with a trusting sweetness which made him feel there was dishonour in the merest tinge of dissimulation.
Mary Byrd was talking as usual in high fluting notes which drowned the gentle ripple of Margaret's voice.
"I was just telling Margaret about the charity ball," she said, "and the way the girls snubbed Patty Vetch in the dressing-room."
"And it was a very good account of young barbarians at play," commented Mr. Culpeper, who was a romantic soul and still read his Byron.
"Patty Vetch? Why, isn't that the daughter of the Governor?" asked Mrs. Culpeper, without a trace of her husband's sympathy for the victim of the "snubbing." A moment later, in accordance with her mental attitude of evasive idealism, she added briskly: "I try not to think of that man as Governor of Virginia."
Of course the subject had come up. Wherever Stephen had been in the past few weeks he had found that the conversation turned to the Governor; and it struck him, while he followed the line of girls headed by his mother's erect figure into the dining-room, that, for good or bad, the influence of Gideon Vetch was as prevalent as an epidemic. All through the long and elaborate meal, in which the viands that his ancestors had preferred were served ceremoniously by slow-moving coloured servants, he listened again to the familiar discussion and analysis of the demagogue, as he still called him. How little, after all, did any one know of Gideon Vetch? Since he had been in office what had they learned except that he was approachable in human relations and unapproachable in political ones?
"I wonder if Stephen noticed the girl at the ball?" said Mrs. Culpeper suddenly, looking tenderly at her son across the lovely George II candlesticks and the dish of expensive fruit, for she could never reconcile with her ideas of economy the spending of a penny on decorations so ephemeral as flowers.
"Oh, he couldn't have helped it," responded Mary Byrd. "Every one saw her. She was dressed very conspicuously."
"Do you imply that you were not?" inquired her father, without facetious intention.
Mary Byrd beamed indulgently in his direction. "Oh, you don't know what it is to be conspicuous, dear," she answered. "What did you think of her dress, Stephen?"
He met her question with a blush. Was he really so modest after the war and France and everything?--Victoria wondered in silence.
"It was something red, wasn't it?" he rejoined vaguely.
"It was scarlet tulle." Mary Byrd, as her mother had once observed, "hadn't an indefinite bone in her body." Then she imparted an additional incident. "She got it badly torn. I saw her pinning it up in the dressing-room."
"I should have been sorry for her," said Margaret simply; and he felt that he had never in his life been so nearly in love with her.
"Is she pretty?" asked Mrs. Culpeper, appealing directly to Stephen as a man and an authority. It was the question the strange woman had put to him in the Square, and ironical mirth seized the young man as he remembered.
"Do you think her pretty, Stephen?" repeated Margaret, and waited, with an expression of impartial interest, for his reply.
For an instant he hesitated. Did he think Patty Vetch pretty or not? "I hardly know," he answered. "I suppose it depends upon whether you like that kind of thing or not. Why don't you ask Peyton?" At the time he couldn't have told himself whether he admired Patty or not. She surprised him, she struck a new note, the note of the unexpected, but whether he liked or disliked it, he could not tell. "There is something unusual about her," he concluded hurriedly, feeling that he had not been quite fair.
"Well, I think she's good looking enough," Peyton, the incurious young man of "advanced" tastes, was replying. "She seems to have a kind of fascination. I don't know what it is, but I dare say she inherited it from her father. The Governor may be unsound in his views and uncertain in his methods, but I've yet to see any one who could resist his smile."
"The Judge admires him," remarked Stephen, with the air of a man who tosses a bomb into a legislative assembly.
"Oh, Stephen," protested Victoria on a high note of interrogation, "how can he?"
"The Judge likes to keep up well with the times," observed Mr. Culpeper, whose final argument against any innovation was the inquiry, "What do you suppose General Lee would have thought of it?" Pausing an instant while the family hung breathlessly on his words, he continued heroically: "Now, it doesn't bother me to be called an old fogy."
"There's no use trying to hide the fact that the Judge isn't quite what he used to be," said Mrs. Culpeper in an unusually tolerant tone. "He has let his habit of joking grow on him until you never know whether he is serious or simply poking fun at you."
"The next thing we hear," suggested Peyton, who was quite dreadful at times, "will be that the old gentleman admires the daughter also."
"He doesn't like conspicuous women," rejoined Victoria. "He told me so only the other day when Mrs. Bradford announced that she was going to run for the legislature."
"That's the kind of conspicuousness we all object to," commented Peyton; "Patty Vetch isn't that sort."
Janet was more merciful. "Well, you are obliged to be conspicuous to-day if you want anybody to notice you," she said. "Look at Mary Byrd."
Mary Byrd tossed her bright head as gaily as if a compliment had been intended. "Oh, you needn't think I like to dress this way," she retorted, "or that I don't sometimes get tired of keeping up with things. Why, there are hours and hours when I simply feel as if I should drop."
"Well, as long as you look like that you needn't hope for a change," remarked Stephen admiringly. Then, turning his gaze away from her too obvious brightness, he looked into the tranquil depths of Margaret's blue eyes, and thought how much more restful the old-fashioned type of woman must have been. Men didn't need to bestir themselves and sharpen their wits with women like that; they were accepted, with their inherent virtues or vices, as philosophically as one accepted the seasons.
It was a dull supper, he thought, because his mind was distracted; but a little later, when they had returned to the drawing-room, and the family had drifted away in separate directions--Mary Byrd and Peyton to a dance, his father to his library, and his mother and the three other girls to a game of bridge in the next room, he received an amazing revelation of Margaret's point of view. His sentiment for the girl had always suffered, he was aware, from too many opportunities. He had sometimes wished that an obstacle might arise, that the formidable parents would try for once to tear them apart instead of thrust them together, but, in spite of the changeless familiarity of their association, he was presently to discover how little he had known of the real Margaret beneath the flowing grace and the nut-brown hair and the eyes like blue larkspur. Though the tribal customs had shaped her body and formed her manners, a rare essence of personality escaped like a perfume from the hereditary mould of the race.
As he looked at her now, sitting gracefully on the ruby brocade of one of the rosewood chairs, with her lovely head framed by the band of intricate carving, he was aware that the delicate subtleties and shadings of her feminine charm made an entirely fresh appeal to his perceptions, if not to his senses. He had never admired her appearance more than he did at that instant; and yet his gaze was as dispassionate as the one he bestowed on the Sully portrait of which she reminded him. Her eyes were very soft; there was a faint smile on her thin pink lips which gave the look of coldness, of reticence to her face. With her head bent and her hands folded in her lap, she sat there waiting pensively--for what? It occurred to him suddenly with a shock that she was deeper, far deeper than he had ever suspected.
"You are so different from the other girls, Margaret," he said at last, oppressed by the old difficulty of making conversation. "You don't belong to the same world with Mary Byrd and--" He was going to add "Patty Vetch," but he checked himself before the name escaped him.
She seemed to melt rather than break from her attitude of waiting, so gently did her movements sink into the shadowy glow of the firelight.
"No, I don't," she replied, with a touch of sadness. "I sometimes wish that I did."
"You wish that you did!" Here was surprise at last. "But, why, in Heaven's name, should you wish that when you are everything that they ought to be?"
"As if that mattered!" There was a tone in her voice that was new to him. "It's gone out of fashion to be superior. Nobody even cares any longer about your being what you ought to be. I've been trained to be the kind of girl that doesn't get on to-day, full of all sorts of forgotten virtues and refinements. Nobody looks at me because everybody is staring so hard at the girls who are improperly dressed. There is only one place where I can be sure of having attention, and that is in an Old Ladies' Home. Old ladies admire me."
For the second time that day he found himself startled by the eccentricities of the feminine mind; but in Margaret's passive resignation there was none of Patty's rebellion against the cruelty and injustice of life. Generations of acquiescence were in the slender figure before him; and he realized that the completeness of her surrender to Fate must have softened her destiny. Both girls were victims of the changing fashion in women, of an age that moved not in a stream, but in a whirlpool.
"I admire you," he said in a caressing voice, "more than I admire any one else in the world."
She had been gazing into the fire, and as she turned slowly in answer to his words, it seemed to him that the blue of a summer sky shone on him from beneath the tremulous shadow of her eyelashes.
"The trouble," she replied, with an appealing glance, "is that I don't know how to be common. There isn't any hope of a girl's being popular if she doesn't know how to be common. I would be if I could," she confessed plaintively, "but I haven't the faintest idea how to begin."
"I hope you'll never learn," he insisted. In awakening his sympathy she had awakened also a deep-rooted protective instinct. He felt that he longed to guard and defend her, as a brother of course, and if this newer and tenderer sentiment was the result of feminine calculation, he was too chivalrous or too inexperienced to perceive it. What he perceived was simply that this lovely girl, whom he had known from infancy, had opened her heart and taken him into her confidence. To admit that she was not a success in her small social world, proved her, he felt, to be both frank and courageous.
"Of course they don't call their way common," she pursued, with what seemed to him the most touching candour. "Their word for it is 'pep'." She pronounced the vulgar syllable as if she abhorred it. "That is what I haven't got, and that's why I have never been a real success in anything except church work. Even in the Red Cross it was 'pep' that counted most, and that was the reason they never sent me to Europe. Mother tried to make me into the kind of girl that men admired when she was young; but the type has gone out of fashion to-day just as much as crinolines or a small waist. If I were clever I suppose I could make myself over and begin to jump about and imitate the sort of animation I never had; but I'm not really clever, for I've tried and I can't do it. It only makes me feel silly to pretend to be what I am not."
Her confession struck him, while he listened to it, as the sweetest and most womanly one he had ever heard.
"I cannot imagine your pretending," he answered, and felt that the remark was as inane as if he had quoted it from a play. After a moment, as she seemed to be waiting for something, he continued with greater assurance, "I dare say they have a quality that the older generation missed. It isn't just commonness. The modern spirit means, I suppose, a breathless vitality. We are more intensely alive than our ancestors, perhaps, more restless, more inclined to take risks."
The phrases he had used made him think suddenly of Gideon Vetch. Was that the secret of the Governor's irresistible magnetism, of his meteoric rise into power? He embodied the modern fetish--success; he was, in the lively idiom of the younger set,--personified "pep." After all, if the old order crumbled, was it not because of its own weakness? Was not the fact of its decay the sign of some secret disintegration, of rottenness at the core? And if the new spirit could destroy, perhaps it could build as well. There might be more in it, he was beginning to discern, than mere lack of control, than vulgar hysteria and undisciplined violence. The quality expressed by that dreadful word was the sparkle on the edge of the tempest, the lightning flash that revealed the presence of electricity in the air. After all, the god of the future was riding the whirlwind.
"I wonder if we can be wrong, you and I?" he went on presently, forgetting the intensely personal nature of Margaret's disclosures, while he followed the abstract trend of his reflections. "Isn't it conceivable that we are standing, not for what is necessarily better, but simply for what is old? Isn't the conservative merely the creature of habit? I suppose the older generation always looks disapprovingly at the younger, and, in spite of our youth, we really belong to the past generation. We see things through the eyes of our parents. We are mentally middle-aged--for middle age is a state of mind, after all. You and I were broken in by tradition--at least I know I was, and even the war couldn't free me. It only made me restless and dissatisfied. It destroyed my belief in the past without giving me faith in the future. It left me eager to go somewhere; but it failed to offer me any direction. It put me to sea without a compass."
Clasping his hands behind his head, he leaned back against the carving of his chair, and fixed his gaze on the portrait of the English ancestress over the mantelpiece. The firelight flickered over his firm, clear-cut features, over the sleek dark hair, which was brushed straight back from his forehead, and over his sombre smoke-coloured eyes in which a dusky glow came and went. Margaret, watching him with her pensive smile, thought that she had never seen him look so "interesting."
"We used to talk in those first days about the 'spiritual effect' of the war," he resumed dreamily, speaking more to himself than to his companion. "As if organized violence could have a steadying effect--could have any results that are not the offspring of violence. It is hard for me to talk about it. I've never even tried before to put it into words; but we are both suffering from the same cause, I think. I know it has played the very deuce with my life. It has made me discontented with what I have; but it hasn't shown me anything else that was worth striving for. I seem to have lost the power of wanting because I've discovered that nothing is worth having after you get it. Every apple has turned into Dead Sea fruit."
He had never before spoken so freely, and when he had finished he felt awkward and half resentful. Margaret's extraordinary frankness had started him, he supposed, on a similar strain; but he wished that he had kept back all that sentimental nonsense about what his mother called disapprovingly, his "frame of mind." Any frame of mind except the permanently settled appeared unsafe to Mrs. Culpeper; and her son felt at the moment that her opinion was justified. Somehow the whole thing seemed to have resulted from his meeting with Gideon Vetch. It was Vetch who had "unsettled" him, who had taken the wind out of the stiff sails of his prejudices. Had the war awakened in him, he wondered, the need of crude emotional stimulants, the dangerous allurement of the unfamiliar, the exotic? Would it ever pass, and would life become again normal and placid without losing its zest and its interest? For it was the zest of life, he realized, that he had encountered in Gideon Vetch.
"But you are a man," Margaret was saying plaintively. "Everything is easier for a man. You can go out and do things."
"So can women now. You can even go into politics."
She made a pretty gesture of aversion. "Oh, I've been too well brought up! There isn't any hope for a girl who is well brought up except the church, and even there she can't do anything but sit and listen to sermons. Mother's consolation," she added with a soft little laugh, "is that I should have been a belle and beauty in the days when Madison was President."
Then putting the subject aside as if she had finished with it for ever, she began talking to him about the books she was reading. Of all the girls he knew she was the only one who ever opened a book except one that had been forbidden.
An hour later, when Margaret went home with her father, Stephen turned back, after putting her into the car, with a warmer emotion in his heart than he had ever felt for her before. She was not only lovely and gentle; she had revealed unexpected qualities of mind which might develop later into an attraction that he had never dreamed she could possess. Never, he felt, had the outlook appeared so desirable. He was in that particular dreaminess of mood when one is easily borne off on waves of sentiment or imagination; and it is possible that, if his mother had been able to refrain from improving perfection, he might have found himself sufficiently in love with Margaret for all practical purposes. But Mrs. Culpeper, who had no need of dissimulation since she had always got things by showing that she wanted them entirely for the good of others, was incapable of leaving her son to work out his own future. When he entered the house again he found her awaiting him at the foot of the staircase.
"I hope you had a pleasant evening, Stephen."
"Yes, Mother, very pleasant."
"Margaret is a dear girl, and so well brought up. Her mother has a great deal for which to be thankful."
"A great deal, I am sure." A sharp sense of irritation had dispelled the dreamy sentiment with which he had parted from Margaret. To his mother, he knew, the evening appeared only as one more carefully planned and carelessly neglected opportunity; and the knowledge of this exasperated him in a measure that was absurdly disproportionate to the cause.
"She is so refreshing after the things you hear about other girls," pursued Mrs. Culpeper. "Poor Mrs. St. John was obliged to go to a rest cure, they say, because of the worry she has had over Geraldine; and the other girls are almost as troublesome, I suppose. That is why I am so thankful that you should have taken a fancy to Margaret. She is just the kind of girl I should like to have for a daughter-in-law."
"You'll have a long time to wait, Mother. I don't want to marry anybody until I need a nurse in my old age."
He spoke jestingly, but his mother, with her usual tenacity, held fast to the subject. Under the flickering gas light in the hall (they were still suspicious of the effect of electricity on Mr. Culpeper's eyes) her face looked grimly determined, as if an indomitable purpose had moulded every feature and traced every line in some thin plastic substance.
"I have set my heart on this, Stephen."
At this he laughed aloud with an indecorous mirth. In spite of her instincts and traditions how lacking in feminine finesse, how utterly without subtlety of method she was! She had stood always for the unconquerable will in the fragile body, and she had used to the utmost her two strong weapons of obstinacy and weakness. He did not know whether the dread of being nagged or the fear of hurting her had influenced him most; and when he looked back he could recall only a series of ineffectual efforts at evasion or denial. It is true that he had once adored her--that he still loved her--but it was a love, like his father's, which was forbearing but never free, which was always furtive and a little ashamed of its own weakness. Ever since he could remember she had triumphed over their inclinations, their convictions, and even their appetites, for they had eaten only what she thought good for them. She had invariably gained her point; and she had gained it with few words, without temper or agitation, by sheer force of character. If she had been a moral principle she could not have moved more relentlessly.
"Mrs. Blair and I used to talk it over when you and Margaret were children," she continued, in the inflexible tone with which she was accustomed to carry her point. "Even then you were fond of her."
He looked at her with a gleam of the tolerant amusement he had caught from his father's expression. "Can you imagine anything more certain to turn a man against a marriage than the thought that it was arranged for him in his infancy?" he objected.
"Not if he knew that his mother had set her heart on it?" She looked hurt but resolute.
"Don't set your heart on it, Mother. Let me dree my own weird."
"My dear boy, it is for your own good. I am sure that you know I am not thinking of myself. I may say with truth that I never think of myself."
It was true. She never thought of herself; but he had sometimes wondered what worse things could have happened if she had occasionally done so.
"I know that, Mother," he answered simply.
"I have but one wish in life and that is to see my children happy," she said, with an air of injured dignity which made him feel curiously guilty.
It was the old infallible method, he knew. She would never yield her point; she would never relax her pressure; she would never admit defeat until he married another woman.
"I want nobody else in your place, Mother. Goodnight, and try to set your heart on something else."
As he undressed a little later he was thinking of Margaret--of her low white brow under the "widow's peak," of her soft blue eyes, of her goodness and gentleness, and of the thrill in her voice when she had made that touching confession. Margaret's voice was the last thing he thought of before falling asleep; but hours afterward, when the dawn was beginning to break, he dreamed of Patty Vetch in her red cape and of that hidden country of the endless roads and the far horizons. _