felt her feet drag
in the waltz. The smell of honeysuckle made her sad as if it brought
back to her senses an unhappy association which she could not remember,
and it seemed to her that her soul and body trembled, like a bent flame,
into an attitude of expectancy.

"Let me stop a minute. I want to watch the others," she said, drawing
back into the scented dusk under a rose arbour.

"But don't you want to fill your card? If the men once catch sight of
you, you won't have a dance left."

"No--no, I want to watch a while," she said, with so strange an accent
of irritation that he stared at her in surprise. The suspense in her
heart hurt her like a drawn cord in throbbing flesh, and she felt angry
with John Henry because he was so dull that he could not see how she
suffered. In the distance, under the waving gilded leaves of the
poplars, she saw Abby laughing up into a man's face, and she thought:
"Can he possibly be in love with Abby? Some men are mad about her, but I
know he isn't. He could never like a loud woman, and, besides, he
couldn't have looked at me that way if he hadn't cared." Then it seemed
to her that something of the aching suspense in her own heart stole into
Abby's laughing face while she watched it, and from Abby it passed
onward into the faces of all the girls who were dancing on the raised
platform. Suspense! Was that a woman's life, after all? Never to be able
to go out and fight for what one wanted! Always to sit at home and wait,
without moving a foot or lifting a hand toward happiness! Never to dare
gallantly! Never even to suffer openly! Always to will in secret, always
to hope in secret, always to triumph or to fail in secret. Never to be
one's self--never to let one's soul or body relax from the attitude of
expectancy into the attitude of achievement. For the first time, born
of the mutinous longing in her heart, there came to her the tragic
vision of life. The faces of the girls, whirling in white muslin to the
music of the waltz, became merged into one, and this was the face of all
womanhood. Love, sorrow, hope, regret, wonder, all the sharp longing and
the slow waiting of the centuries--above all the slow waiting--these
things were in her brief vision of that single face that looked back at
her out of the whirling dance. Then the music stopped, the one face
dissolved into many faces, and from among them Susan passed under the
swinging lanterns and came towards her.

"Oh, Jinny, where have