Virgie's last letter relieved its recipient of all the qualms he had previously felt. The refreshing innocence that ran through all her expressions; the wonderment, the sympathy and the lack of blaze discussion in even the most trivial things had at first led him to partial disbelief. The continuance, though, of her simple style, soon carried him over the doubting point, and, as he caught the true, fundamental matter from which her thoughts emanated, he became happy with the discovery that he had unwittingly made. To have shared with his friends the pleasure of her freshness would have been his greatest delight, but there were two things that caused him to forego this pleasure. First, he knew that a partial quotation from the correspondence would have taxed their credulity and lessened their belief in his own sanity, but to substantiate the truth would necessitate a complete exposure of her letters, and this he could not conscientiously do. What delight it was, then, when she sought a nearer relation with her cousins and begged his services as a medium! It presented at once the opportunity for a free discussion of her own personality, with all the use of her letters that he could have desired for substantiation of his claims. He sought the first opportunity that presented itself. Nay, better. He made an opportunity at once to have the society of the Misses Brandt, and, with that opportunity, introduced early in the conversation the subject that filled him with pride and elation.
"I have, without a doubt, found your cousin!" he said, suppressing as best he could the warmth of pride that was forcing him to a conclusion that he would rather have prolonged.
"Indeed?" said the elder young lady suavely. "My dear Frank, you are not going in for genealogy? It's already done to death, you know," she ended with more animation.
"Well no; hardly that," he replied, laughing. "But, honest; this is deeply interesting. I thought you might care!"
"Don't mind her," the younger woman said, with a small show of pique; "but tell us about her. Has she the family characteristics?"
"Yes, a bit proud; but humble to the last degree," he replied, with covert sarcasm for Barbara, the elder.
"Works, I suppose?" Barbara retaliated.
"Barbara, you are the worst!" Norma laughed, while Frank smiled good-humoredly.
"Come, my dear, if you are going with me!" Mrs. Brandt said to her eldest daughter, as she came into the room unceremoniously. Then, discovering Harvey—"How do you do, Mr. Harvey? I did not know that we had company."
"Do take Barbara away quick, mamma; she's wretched!" Norma put in before Frank could respond, and, as the two laughingly passed from the room, she resumed: "Now—is your Indiana girl really our cousin?"
"I sincerely believe her to be," Frank asserted rather stiffly, chilled by the sister's treatment of the subject.
"You believe she is? I thought you were more positive. Come—don't pay any attention to Barbara; you should be used to her by this time. Tell me of our cousin?"
"I thought that I had lots to tell," Frank replied to her coaxing, "but it has sort of oozed. Never mind, though; Miss Virgie is your cousin, and she has become deeply interested in you. She wants me to tell her all about all of you. Have you any news to send?"
"What a sweet name—Virgie!" she answered evasively, and Frank revived all of his former interest at once.
"And a much sweeter girl!" he replied. "She knows almost nothing, yet she seems to know almost everything!"
"A paradox," Norma smiled.
"I mean she is—or—I don't know how to say it; yet she is—well, anyway, she has all the simplicity of innocence, while everyone who knows her gets some learning from her good-heartedness. She lives where people know how to live. Not rapid like we do, but taking all there is out of every day instead of pulling up time and throwing it away just to get to some business climax or social climax, as we are all the time doing."
"I know—I know," Norma said, impatiently. "No preaching on the 'pace that kills,' but stick to the original text."
"Well," he said, drawing a letter from his pocket, "perhaps this will give you an insight into her character." And he read an extract that covered Virgie's opinion of Annapolis.
"How delightfully interesting! Such a view to take! That girl is impossible—there never lived such an inconsistency."
"How inconsistent?" he asked, contentedly.
"Why innocent, of course; yet with the wisdom that discerns the fallacies of war even beyond our statesmen's perceptions."
"There you are!" he said, triumphantly. "There is my paradox. Everything she says has that odd association of things opposite in it, showing how strange she is."
"But tell me—has she traveled?"
"Not fifty miles away from her home."
"Never been to college?"
"Never."
"Nor seen the world? Certainly not, as you say she has not traveled. How does she do it?" she asked, perplexed.
"She is natural," he replied summingly.
"What a dear she must be! Read me some more—but wait," she said quickly. "You said that she is natural. I would say that she is unusual. How do you reconcile the two?"
"To be natural is to be unusual, isn't it?" he smilingly asked.
"Why you are absurd—inconsistent!"
"No, I am not," he replied confidently. "I can reason it out for you very readily. Now listen!" and he moved forward, sitting on the edge of his chair.
"I am listening. Oh! wise man, you were ever a logician, and logic proves anything. Go on!"
"You seek to disconcert me, for you scent defeat," he said, laughing. "But I will have my say. Tell me—where would one derive naturalness but from nature? You grant that?" he asked, as she poised her lips in good-humored stubbornness. "Well, then, we people see nature so little that it affects us not at all, and we are far from natural, which makes that virtue unusual among us. We only ape each other. That's what all of us are—just apes."
"If you please," she said, in suppressed mirth, "you may count me out of your reasoning hereafter. If you must make confessions—well—" And after the pause they both laughed heartily. "You have made your point though, I guess, so please tell me more of Virgie or read something more."
Frank was an ordinary man, insomuch as he was invariably self-convinced by his own logic. Norma had left an opening for the continuance of his reasoning by her careless assertion of "I guess" at the end of acknowledging defeat. He pondered over it a second, then struck an argumentative attitude, and was about to resume when she broke in:
"I am convinced. Why continue? You are very natural anyway, because you have all the usual back-country verbosity, and you are an old ape; so am I an ape. We are all apes! Now let the matter go and tell me some of the things I want to know. Doesn't she care to come out into the world? Doesn't she want to travel and see things? Isn't she tired of her limited surroundings?"
"I hardly know," he replied, as he scanned several sheets of Virgie's letters, which he had just brought to light. "Listen to this!" he said, his face becoming suddenly animated :
"I can scarcely understand or comprehend so many people as you write of being together, living within touch of each other, where they neighbor as our townspeople do here in Ashville." "She is always writing about cities and people," Frank interpolated, in partial explanation, continuing with growing pride:
"What a number of people everybody must have to remember! I should think it would be awfully inconvenient. But, then, people must congregate for self-advancement. My own narrow surroundings have taught me that; and yet, when I think of it, no one here has advanced much—I mean like you seem to have learned things. Of course everybody is better and more gentle. I would not have you think me dissatisfied with my people—not for the world! There is poor, old, good-natured Uncle 'Si,' who is doing nearly all of Aunt Faribee's work around the hotel because she is sick again. He is better and gentler for having talked to and been with lots of people, but that, some way, is not the kind of being better off that I mean. You seemed to know about everything, and I suppose all city people are that way; maybe not so much, but nobody seems to know those things here. You are different. Parson Kent is most like you of anybody here, though he has changed. I really believe sometimes that I am growing dissatisfied because your standard is too high for the others. I shall have to be careful, or else I will find myself longing for city people and city life. Wouldn't that be ungrateful of me?"
"What do you think of my standard now?" Frank asked, with ill-concealed pride, as he re-folded the letter.
Norma's lips parted, but she did not speak. She raised her handkerchief from her lap and drew the edge slowly through her fingers. The admiration that the letter expressed carried a more true meaning to her previously unsuspicious heart than it had to his, and the shock, on fathoming her cousin's unspoken confession, was near to being unconquerable. Keen, womanly perception took her through the half-evident individual admiration in Virgie's words, and back of them she found an innocence, sweet, yet all the more hurtful to herself—for she could have resented boldness or even rivalry; but, with her cousin, all unaware of the glorious happiness or poignant grief to which she was leading herself, Norman could not find in these seconds so small a morsel of comfort as resentment.
Virgie had exalted this one man above her home, her life and her own townsmen. This in itself would have been significant to any woman who might make deductions from indications. Norma's own admiration and love had gone where her cousin's were surely going; so to her the words but poorly covered their author's unconscious position, and she jealously guessed the end quite some time before Harvey had finished reading. He had read the lines through a dozen times to himself; at first with a surprised pride that had since never quite left him, although his position from her standpoint became later ludicrous and wholly untenable even in his own mind. Norma derived from them much more than his happy vanity allowed him to. No other construction could have made the real facts more clear to her. The word-grouping was only a network or pattern woven and interwoven with guileless patchery, and through it the growing tumult shone with rare glint.
"What do I think of your standard?" she repeated after a pause, her tone so suppressed that the words seemed only the vibration of his own.
"Oh, I say now, Norma, don't take it that way! You know it was only a little silliness that I indulged myself. Any other fellow might have taken her the same way. There is novelty in it for both of us. I liked the country novelty and she the city; that's all there is in it. Of course she put me on a pinnacle, but—well, this is just what I feared. I have never said anything about it to anyone, for the reason that they would think me a fool possibly; and that is what you think," he said earnestly, as she raised her eyes and looked into his half angrily. "Oh! I know," he resumed, with a resentful though unassured forcefulness, "that's what you think. There was a time when I took all the praise and favorable comparisons with a foolish satisfaction, and who wouldn't? She is wise enough to give her arguments strength. But that time has gone now, and I have come to be sensible about it. I like the correspondence best now because of her piquant sentences; because of its freshness; because of her unusualness; and, with my vanity gone, I felt that I might tell you of it all because she is your cousin. I thought you would understand—you usually do understand, Norma. She always wanted to know about—"
"Listen!" she said quietly, for she was calmer now. "Do you know what you are saying?"
"I was explaining," he said, apologetically.
"Then explain no further," she said, and he waited for her to resume. "Your explanation is as transparent," she commenced coldly, "as are Virgie's letters. Oh! the poor stupidity of men," and she tossed her head angrily.
"Thanks!" he said, with a sarcastic smile.
"I am not playing with words," she retorted angrily. "Men are stupid, careless—contemptibly so!"
He gazed at her fixedly—surprisedly. She laid her hands in her lap, pressing them hotly together, and returned his gaze fearlessly because of her rising anger: "You are given power to lead, the right to lead, and in your stupid self-glorification you step into by-ways hugging your petty vanity. You have loved your friend's letters because they flattered you. You have smiled over them, gloried in them and lived with them because of this pleasure that they gave you. Did you ever think of what she may have derived from it all? Did you ever reflect on the consequences of this admiration that she has expressed? Perhaps you have deluded yourself with the thought that it is only environment—your environment—that has given her so unusual an opinion of you. Yes; therein lies your stupidity. I should hate you!" she said passionately, "I should hate you with all the strength of bitter disappointment if it were different! But you are a man, only a stupid man, not to have seen aught save your own pleasure."
"What do you mean?" he asked, too moved by her violent attack to feel anger or resentment—only mystified by her many words and startled by her ferocity.
"I mean," she said, and her voice sank to the softness of tender sympathy; "I mean that my cousin is beginning to love you, and you—you—only love yourself, which should bring you shame for your blind selfishness."
"Oh, that's nonsense!" he replied, laughing nervously. But she only looked into his face, and he could not continue because of her hurt in finding him so undiscerning.
Frank essayed to laugh again in his sorry abjection, but her gaze restrained him, and his eyes turned toward the floor in embarrassment. She had solved for him convincingly, in one sentence, the cause of Virgie's flattering admiration. Norma's tones were too full of pity for her and condemnation for himself to leave a doubt as to the correctness of her conclusions. The words "she loves me" at first flushed him inwardly, but instant reaction came because of the steady gaze before him, and he became ashamed. He grasped the arms of his chair, then relaxed the hold, and, raising his eyes to hers, he said timidly:
"I did not know."
Norma turned her head confusedly, for she gathered at once his complete innocence. She was ashamed to have made him confess his lack of love, and yet her heart beat with relieved joy. It was he now who gazed almost questioningly. She could not meet his eyes, and in total embarrassment she arose and went to the window, where she stood behind him. Frank watched her until she had passed, though he did not turn to follow her further, and when she was out of his range of vision he knit his brows perplexedly. Self-condemnation engaged his thoughts. Her actions tormented his contrition. As she passed his chair she passed from his reasoning, and Virgie alone filled his thoughts. In and out she came and went, through a winding mass of circumstances, entangling him more and more in the mesh of contemptible doings and sayings of mostly his, but partly her authorship, until he was humiliated bitterly.
"Rank stupidity," he mused. "Anyone with half sense would have seen and understood. I wonder why I did not! She saw, so why not I?" he said, coming back to Norma. "But women understand these things more readily than men" came the thought, and his pulse quickened. His thoughts flew then. Stagnation and bitterness were gone on the instant. "If women know, why do they know? It must be sympathy. Could it follow that her quick perception can come from the sympathy of experience?" he asked himself in an elated hope. He moved slightly, but sank back again at once; then stiffened with a sudden resolve, firm in the belief that he must retrieve his position in Norma's favor just now, if ever; and he rose and walked to where she stood. Drawing the portieres together so as to hold them with one hand, he closed out the street. Norma offered no resistance, only permitting her hold to relax, and her arm hung loosely at her side.
"I know why you understood," he said positively, though his eager eyes belied the tone and implied a question.
Her eyes indicated that she did not grasp his meaning, as she pondered the words; but slowly his expression gave her the solution, and she turned quickly to leave. The first flush of understanding was not so fleet, however, but that he observed it, and, as quickly as she sought to cover its significance by flight, just so quickly did he grasp her with his disengaged arm, drawing her to him. She struggled feebly, and he was re-assured.
"If you are not quiet," he said, "I will have to let go of the portieres."
"You are mean," she replied, becoming at once passive.
"I don't feel so," he retorted joyously, and forgetting to further guard the window, he relinquished the portieres and, placing both arms about her, held her gently to him and kissed her repeatedly with tender reverence.