"do you call George good? The General thinks
he's a sad scamp."

The lump of sugar dropped with a splash into her cup, and her eyes were
dark as she raised them quickly to my face. Instinctively I felt, with a
blind groping of perception, that I had wounded her pride, or her
loyalty, or some other hereditary attribute of the Blands and the
Fairfaxes that I could not comprehend.

"If I wanted an estimate of goodness, I don't think I'd go to the
General as an authority," she retorted.

"I'm sorry you never liked him, Sally. He's a great man."

"Well, he isn't _my_ great man anyway," she retorted. "I prefer Dr.
Theophilus or George."

I laughed gayly. "The doctor is a mollycoddle and George is a fop." My
tone was jaunty, yet her words were like the prick of a needle in a
sensitive place. What was her praise of George except the confession of
an appreciation of the very things that I could never possess? I knew
she loved me and not George--was not her marriage a proof of this
sufficient to cover a lifetime?--yet I knew also that the external
graces which I treated with scorn because I lacked them, held for her
the charm of habit, of association, of racial memory. Would the power in
me that had captured her serve as well through a future of familiar
possession as it had served in the supreme moment of conquest? I could
not go through life, as I had once said, forever pushing a wheel up a
hill, and the strength of a shoulder might prove, after all, less
effective in the freedom of daily intercourse than the quickness or
delicacy of a manner. Would she begin to regret presently, I wondered,
the lack in the man she loved of those smaller virtues which in the
first rosy glow of romance had seemed to her insignificant and of little
worth?

"There are worse things than a mollycoddle or a fop," she rejoined after
a pause, and added quickly, while old Esdras left the dining-room to
answer a ring at the bell, "That's either Bonny Page or George now. One
of them is coming to take me out."

For a moment I hoped foolishly that the visitor might be Bonny Page, but
the sound of George's pleasant drawling voice was heard speaking to old
Esdras, and as the curtains swung back, he crossed the threshold and
came over to take Sally's outstretched hand.

"You're lunching late to-day," he said. "I don't often find you here at
this hour, Ben."

"No, I'm not a man-about-town like you," I replied, pushing the cigars
and the lamp toward