"Go to Patty," she whispered. "Go to her and repeat what you have said to us." Putting her hand on his arm, she led him into the room where the girl was kneeling, and then drew back while he went quickly forward.
Watching from the threshold, she saw Patty look up uncertainly, and rise slowly from the floor where she had been kneeling; she saw Stephen put out his arms with a movement of love and pity; and she saw the girl hesitate for an instant, and then turn to his clasp as a hurt child turns for comfort. That was youth, that was the future, thought Corinna, and closing the door softly, she left them together. Yes, youth was for the future, and for herself, _she_ realized with a pang, were the things that she had never had in the past. Only the things that she had never had were really hers! Only the unfulfilled, she saw in that moment of illuminating insight, is the permanent.
Pa.s.sing the group in the hall, she went out on the porch, and looked with swimming eyes over the fountain into the Square. Beyond the white streams of electricity and the black patterns of the shadows, she saw the sharp outlines of the city, and beyond that the immense blue field of the sky sown thickly with stars. Life was there--life that embraced success and failure, illusion and disillusion, birth and death. In the morning she would go back to it--she would begin again--in the morning she would will herself to pick up the threads of middle age as lightly as Stephen and Patty would pick up the threads of youth. To-morrow she would start living again--but to-night for a few hours she would rest from life; she would look back now, as she had looked back that morning, to where a man was standing in the bright gra.s.s with the sunrise above his head.
BOOKS BY ELLEN GLASGOW
LIFE AND GABRIELLA
ONE MAN IN HIS TIME
PHASES OF AN INFERIOR PLANET
THE ANCIENT LAW
THE BATTLE-GROUND
THE BUILDERS
THE DELIVERANCE
THE DESCENDANT
THE FREEMAN AND OTHER POEMS
THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH
THE ROMANCE OF A PLAIN MAN
THE VOICE OF THE PEOPLE
THE WHEEL OF LIFE
VIRGINIA