G. B. Lancaster

“ So they parted, and Virginia went back to the Maryland plantation to dream the rest of her life out alone, and Gary went whither his wild star led him, tasting more of good and evil than Virginia read in all her books, feeling the flame of hot life sear him, and going out to meet joy as a man only does go who has known sorrow. ”

“ But the mighty hemlocks and firs were hushed, and the roar of the distant river was just a thread in the great sheet of silence.
“Why, yes,” said Virginia, very slowly. “That is it. I was never young, and it was youth that he wanted. And—I didn’t know it; 1 didn’t know it—until now.”
One of the very truest truths of life is the certainty that we can never evade its big things—the big things of love, of pain, of that sudden body-and-spirit jolt which is called the awakening of the soul. If they come early they generally twist the future current of events awry. ”

“ If they come late they hurt more. That is the only difference. To Virginia they had come late. They had come late because the creed taught her by her stately old adamantine grandmother in the stately old stone-and-brick mansion among the Maryland plantations had covered externals only. From her babyhood Virginia had known just how to sit and to stand, just how to give an order to a servant, and how to talk to men with the same delicate indifference that she used when dipping her slim finger-tips into the old chased finger-bowls. ”

“ Virginia was a clever woman, but she was not a wise one. In all manner of philosophy, of theology, of metaphysics, she could have distanced Baby in the first lap, but that wisdom which comes of a woman’s knowledge of her womanhood was not hers ”

“ She bent forward, mischief breathing from every kink of her bright hair. “You can have the gray lady,” she whispered. “H-sh! She’s just coming.”
The man slid from the rail as the woman passed by. Then he turned down the platform, with the child’s hand shut into his. ”