feathery palm branches in the brilliantly lighted hall; and a sense of
kinship with my own family, with my own past, awoke not in my thoughts,
but in my body. Across the threshold, only a few steps away, I could see
Sally receiving her guests in her gracious Fairfax manner, with George
and the man whom I did not know at her side; and whenever George turned
and spoke, as he did always at the right instant, I was struck by the
perfect agreement, the fitness, in their appearance. These things that
she valued--these adornments of the outside of existence--were not in my
power to bestow except when they could be bought with money. How large,
how heavy, I should have appeared there in George's place, which was
mine. For the first time in my life a contempt for mere wealth, and for
the position which the amassment of wealth confers, entered my heart. In
seeking to give money had I, in reality, sacrificed the ability to give
the things that she valued far more? Surrounded by the flowers and the
lights and the music of the stringed instruments, I saw her in my memory
framed in the long window of our bedroom on Church Hill, with the dim
grey garden behind her, and the breeze, fragrant with jessamine, blowing
the thin folds of her gown. Some clairvoyant insight, purchased, not by
success, but by the suffering of those months, opened my eyes. What I
had lost, I saw now, was Sally herself--not the outward woman, but the
inner spirit, the fineness of sympathy, the quickness of understanding.
The things that she could have taught me were the finer beauties of
life--and these I had scorned to learn because they could not be grasped
in the hands. The objective, the external, was what I had worshipped,
and our real division had come, not from the accident of our different
beginnings, but from the choice that had committed us to opposite ends.

Some of the guests I knew, and these spoke to me as they passed; others
I had never seen, and these walked by with level abstracted eyes fixed
on the little group surrounding Sally and George. It was not only
Sally's "set"--the older aristocratic circle--that was represented, I
knew, for in the throng I recognised many of "the new people"--of the
"mushrooms," of whom Bonny's grandmama had spoken with scorn. Once
George turned and came toward the doorway, and the General, starting
somewhere from a corner, observed in his loud hilarious voice, "I don't
know what kind of husband you'd have made, George