Virginia nodded eagerly. "In my secret heart that is what I am hoping for,
my dear."
"Unless there is another man," added Aline, as if alone with her thoughts.
Virginia was irritably aware of a flood of color beating into her cheeks.
"There isn't any other man," she said impatiently.
Yet she thought of Lyndon Hobart. Curiously enough, whenever she conceived
herself as marrying Ridgway, the reflex of her brain carried to her a
picture of Hobart, clean-handed, fine of instinct, with the inherited
inflections of voice and unconscious pride of caste that come from breeding
and not from cultivation. If he were not born to greatness, like his rival,
at least he satisfied her critical judgment of what a gentleman should be;
and she was quite sure that the potential capacity lay in her to care a
good deal more for him than for anybody else she had met. Since it was not
on the cards, as Miss Virginia had shuffled the pack, that she should marry
primarily for reasons sentimental, this annoyed her in her sophisticated
hours.
But in the hours when she was a mere girl when she was not so confidently
the heir of all the feminine wisdom of the ages, her annoyance took another
form.
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