was a gnarled and
twisted ailanthus tree, and from its roots the ground fell sharply to a
distant view of rear enclosures and grim smoking factories. Some clothes
fluttered on a line that stretched from a bough of the tree, and turning
away as if they offended her, Virginia closed her eyes and breathed in
the sweetness of the honeysuckle, which mingled deliciously with the
strange new sense of approaching happiness in her heart. The awakening
of her imagination--an event more tumultuous in its effects than the
mere awakening of emotion--had changed not only her inner life, but the
ordinary details of the world in which she lived. Because a young man,
who differed in no appreciable manner from dozens of other young men,
had gazed into her eyes for an instant, the whole universe was altered.
What had been until to-day a vague, wind-driven longing for happiness,
the reaching out of the dream toward the reality, had assumed suddenly a
fixed and definite purpose. Her bright girlish visions had wrapped
themselves in a garment of flesh. A miracle more wonderful than any she
had read of had occurred in the streets of Dinwiddie--in the very spot
where she had walked, with blind eyes and deaf ears, every day since she
could remember. Her soul blossomed in the twilight, as a flower
blossoms, and shed its virginal sweetness. For the first time in her
twenty years she felt that an unexplored region of happiness surrounded
her. Life appeared so beautiful that she wanted to grasp and hold each
fugitive sensation before it escaped her. "This is different from
anything I've ever known. I never imagined it would be like this," she
thought, and the next minute: "I wonder why no one has ever told me that
it would happen? I wonder if it has ever really happened before, just
like this, since the world began? Of all the ways I've dreamed of his
coming, I never thought of this way--no, not for an instant. That I
should see him first in the street like any stranger--that he should be
Susan's cousin--that we should not have spoken a word before I knew it
was he!" Everything about him, his smile, his clothes, the way he held
his head and brushed his hair straight back from his forehead, his
manner of reclining with a slight slouch on the seat of the cart, the
picturesque blue dotted tie he wore, his hands, his way of bowing, the
red-brown of his face, and above all the eager, impetuous look in his
dark eyes--these things possessed a glowing quality