Page:O Genteel Lady! (1926).pdf/159

 Smith Scollay, who had first admired her as she whisked through Harvard Square in the red Russian sleigh, should declare himself, as there was reason to believe he might.

Life, by some alchemy, had melted her softer metals in its retort, and now poured her out again in different mould, tempered perhaps into a more precious substance. She felt calm and assured. Time had thrown down its gage, for she was twenty-five and considered herself no longer young, but she did not shrink from its challenge. Years whirling out of the onrushing space would involve and in the end destroy. She breathed upon her palm to feel the body's heat, and thought how it is the gift of many generations of dead men. And she would be cold some day and the teeth she tapped with her pencil and the hair she sleeked with her hand would be the last things to be left of her, except the skeleton waiting within. It did not matter what happened to the soul; perhaps like Mohammedan women she had none. Perhaps she lost it during the hours so bright, always, with firelight and sunshine, spent with Anthony Jones. But she had a sense of peace, a feeling that whatever happened she could endure. To herself it seemed that she had reached the andante passages in her symphony, after having lived through the scherzo, and she sighed and stretched herself in her new-found peace. Thank God she had some money. She would never be so driven for it as Bronson Alcott's girls out in Concord. Poor Louisa, just her age, washed and baked and sewed all day. She had even hired out as a serv-