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of the sentimentality in which he religiously shrouded the feminine sex.
So ineradicable, indeed, was his belief in the inherent virtue of every
woman, that he had several times fallen a helpless victim in the
financial traps of conscienceless Delilahs. But since his innocence was
as temperamental a quality as was Virginia's maternal passion,
experience had taught him nothing, and the fact that he had been
deceived in the past threw no shadow of safeguard around his steps in
the present. This endearing trait, which made him so successful as a
husband, was probably the cause of his unmitigated failure as a
reformer. In looking at a woman, it was impossible for him to see
anything except perfection.

When Susan reached the top of the staircase, Mrs. Pendleton called to
her, through the half open door of the nursery, to come in and hear how
beautifully Lucy was saying her prayers. Her voice was full of a
suppressed excitement; there was a soft pink flush in her cheeks; and it
seemed to Susan that the presence of her grandchildren had made her
almost a girl again. She sat on the edge of a trundle-bed slipping a
nightgown over the plump shoulders of little Lucy, who held herself very
still and prim, for she was a serious child, with a natural taste for
propriety. Her small plain face, with its prominent features and pale
blue eyes, had a look of intense earnestness and concentration, as
though the business of getting to bed absorbed all her energies; and the
only movement she made was to toss back the slender and very tight
braid of brown hair from her shoulders. She said her prayer as if it
were the multiplication table, and having finished, slid gently into
bed, and held up her face to be kissed.

"Jenny wouldn't drink but half of her bottle, Miss Virginia," said
Marthy, appearing suddenly on the threshold of Virginia's bedroom, for
the youngest child slept in the room with her mother. "She dropped off
to sleep so sound that I couldn't wake her."

"I hope she isn't sick, Marthy," responded Virginia in an anxious tone.
"Did she seem at all feverish?"

"Naw'm, she ain't feverish, she's jest sleepy headed."

"Well, I'll come and look at her as soon as I can persuade Harry to
finish his prayers. He stopped in the middle of them, and he refuses to
bless anybody but himself."

She spoke gravely, gazing with her exhaustless patience over the impish
yellow head of Harry, who knelt, in his little nightgown, on the rug at