ke a legend.
Romance and mystery were in her smile; and yet what had life held for
her, she mused now, except the frustrated hope, the blighted fruit, the
painted lily? Her beauty had brought her nothing that was not tawdry,
nothing that was not a gaudy imitation of happiness. She had given
herself for what? For the shadow of reality, for the tinted shreds of a
damaged illusion. The past, in spite of her many triumphs, had been
worse than tragic; it had been comic--since it had left her beggared.
Looking back upon it now she saw that it had lacked even the mournful
dignity of a broken heart.

"I have had a mean life; but it isn't over yet, and I may make something
better of the rest of it," she thought. "At least I have fighting blood
in my veins, and I will never give up. After all, even if my life has
been mean, I haven't been--and that is what really counts in the end.
If I haven't been happy, I have tried to be gallant--and it takes
courage to be gallant with an aching heart--"

As she fastened the long string of pearls--one of Kent Page's early
gifts--she drew back from the mirror, with the light of philosophy, if
not of happiness, overflowing her eyes. With her grace and her radiance
she stood for the flower of the Virginian aristocratic tradition; with
her sincerity and her fearlessness she embodied the American democratic
ideal. Her forefathers had brought representative government to the New
World. They had sat in the first General Assembly ever summoned in
America; and through the generations they had fought always on the side
of liberty tempered by discipline, of democracy exalted by patriotism.
They had stood from the beginning for dignity, for manners, for the
essence of social culture which places art at the service of life.
Always they had sought to preserve the finer lessons of the past; always
they had struggled against the tyranny of mediocrity, the increasing
cult of the second best. From this source, from the inherited instinct
for selection, for elimination, from the inbred tendency toward order
and suavity of living, Corinna had derived her clear-eyed acceptance of
life, her nobility of mind, her loveliness and grace of body. She had
been prepared and nurtured for beauty, only to bloom in an age when
beauty had been bartered for usefulness. Would the delicate
discriminations in which she had been trained, the lights and shadows of
her soul, become submerged in the modern effort to reduce all
dist