She reminded him of his mother, did Virginia, though no two women in the world were ever fundamentally more different. Nevertheless, there was a likeness between the little pearl-set miniature which he cherished, showing Honora Le Garde in the prime of her beauty, and this girl who looked up at him with eyes of the self-same brown. Surely, Virginia should not be held responsible for the fact that a slender, graceful creature with yellow hair and dark-lashed hazel eyes, with faint pink flushes coming and going in her cheeks, and the air of looking out at the world with indifference from a safe and sheltered distance, was Roderick Le Garde’s ideal of womanhood, and that he regarded her, the representative of the type, as the embodiment of everything sweetest and highest in human nature. Virginia’s physique, like Roderick’s preconceptions of life and love and honor, was an inheritance, but a less significant one; it required an effort to live up to it, and Virginia was not fond of effort. His feeling for her was worship. Virginia had not been looking on at the pageant (Roderick would have called it a pageant) of society very long, but she was a beautiful girl and a rich one; therefore she had seen what called itself love before. As an example of what a suitor’s attitude should be, she preferred Roderick’s expression of devotion to that of any man she knew. He made her few compliments, and those in set and guarded phrase; except on abstract topics, his speech with her was restrained to the point of chilliness; even the admiration of his eyes was controlled as they met hers. But on rare occasions the veil dropped from them, and then--Virginia did not know what there was about these occasions that she should find them so fascinating; that she should watch for them and wait for them, and even try to provoke them, as she did. Worship is not exactly the form of sentiment of which hopelessness can be predicated, but Roderick was human enough to wish that the niche in which his angel was enshrined might be in his own home. He let her see this one day in the simplicity of his devotion. “Not that I ask for anything, you understand,” he added, hastily. “I could not do that. It is only that I would give you the knowledge that I love you, as--as I might give you a rose to wear. It honors the flower, you see,” he said, rather wistfully. She lifted her eyes to his, and he wondered why there should flash across his mind a recollection of the flowers she had worn yesterday, a cluster of Maréchal Niels that she had raised to her lips once or twice, kissing the golden petals. She made absolutely no answer to his speech, unless the faintest, most evanescent of all her faint smiles could be called an answer. But she was not angry, and she gave him her hand at parting. In spite of her silence she thought of his words. The little that she had to say upon the subject she said to her father as they were sitting before the library fire that evening.