, too substantial for ornament, was strewn with late periodicals and
pamphlets--English, American, and French--and with books which lay
unarranged as they were thrown down from recent reading. In the centre
was a bunch of red roses in a pale-blue Granada jug. Miss Forsythe rose
from a seat in the western window, with a book in her hand, to greet her
callers. She was slender, like Margaret, but taller, with soft brown eyes
and hair streaked with gray, which, sweeping plainly aside from her
forehead in a fashion then antiquated, contrasted finely with the flush
of pink in her cheeks. This flush did not suggest youth, but rather
ripeness, the tone that comes with the lines made in the face by gentle
acceptance of the inevitable in life. In her quiet and self-possessed
manner there was a little note of graceful timidity, not perhaps
noticeable in itself, but in contrast with that unmistakable air of
confidence which a woman married always has, and which in the unrefined
becomes assertive, an exaggerated notion of her importance, of the value
added to her opinions by the act of marriage. You can see it in her air
the moment she walks away from the altar, keeping step to Mendelssohn's
tune. Jack Sharpley says that she always seems to be saying, "Well, I've
done it once for all." This assumption of the married must be one of the
hardest things for single women to bear in their self-congratulating
sisters.

I have no doubt that Georgiana Forsythe was a charming girl, spirited and
handsome; for the beauty of her years, almost pathetic in its dignity and
self-renunciation, could not have followed mere prettiness or a
commonplace experience. What that had been I never inquired, but it had
not soured her. She was not communicative nor confidential, I fancy, with
any one, but she was always friendly and sympathetic to the trouble of
others, and helpful in an undemonstrative way. If she herself had a
secret feeling that her life was a failure, it never impressed her
friends so, it was so even, and full of good offices and quiet enjoyment.
Heaven only knows, however, the pathos of this apparently undisturbed
life. For did a woman ever live who would not give all the years of
tasteless serenity, for one year, for one month, for one hour, of the
uncalculating delirium of love poured out upon a man who returned it? It
may be better for the world that there are these women to whom life has
still some mysteries, who are capable of illusions