y say something clever! If she could only say the sort of thing
that would shock Miss Priscilla! But nothing came of her wish, and she
was reduced at last to the pathetic rejoinder, "I don't know. I'm afraid
I've never thought about it."

For a moment he stared at her as though he were enraptured by her reply.
With such eyes and such hair, she might have been as simple as she
appeared and he would never have known it. "Of course you haven't, or
you wouldn't be you!" he responded; and by the time she came to her
senses, she was following her mother and the negro urchin out of the
market. Though she was in reality walking over cinders, she felt that
her feet were treading on golden air.

CHAPTER IV

THE TREADWELLS

Above the Dinwiddie of Virginia's girlhood, rising sharply out of the
smoothly blended level of personalities, there towered, as far back as
she could remember, the grim and yet strangely living figure of Cyrus
Treadwell. From the intimate social life of the town he had remained
immovably detached; but from the beginning it had been impossible for
that life to ignore him. Among a people knit by a common pulse, yet
separated by a multitude of individual differences, he stood aloof and
indispensable, like one of the gaunt iron bridges of his great railroad.
He was at once the destroyer and the builder--the inexorable foe of the
old feudal order and the beneficent source of the new industrialism.
Though half of Dinwiddie hated him, the other half (hating him, perhaps
none the less) ate its bread from his hands. The town, which had lived,
fought, lost, and suffered not as a group of individuals, but as a
psychological unit, had surrendered at last, less to the idea of
readjustment than to the indomitable purpose of a single mind.

And yet nobody in Dinwiddie, not even Miss Willy Whitlow, who sewed out
by the day, and knew the intimate structure of every skeleton in every
closet of the town--nobody could tell the precise instant at which Cyrus
had ceased to be an ordinary man and become a great one. A phrase,
which had started as usual, "The Mr. Treadwell, you know, who married
poor Belinda Bolingbroke--" swerved suddenly to "Cyrus Treadwell told me
that, and you must admit that _he_ knows what he is talking about"--and
a reputation was made! His marriage to "poor Belinda," which had at
first appeared to be the most conspicuous fact in his career, dwindled
to insignificance beside the rebuilding of the