The more she looked at Santa Beata the more Sophia, who without thinking much about it had a realization of her own type, was struck by the resemblance between them. The red-brown hair folded about Sophia's head was darker than the locks that lay combed out over the saint's pillow, but the long oval of the faces, the girlish thinness of modelling and the narrow eyes set in heavily folded lids over rather prominent cheekbones, were the same; and the same, too, were the pointed chins and the delicately full lips tucked in at the corners like those of a child. Santa Beata had only been sixteen at the time of her death and Sophia was twenty-two, but the earlier ripening of the South made the apparent years swing level. Suddenly Sophia turned away, fierce envy of this untroubled girl who had finished long ago with the business of life surging in her heart. The memory of the past weeks seemed shameful and she herself not fit to hold intercourse with other girls--girls to whom things had not happened. In that moment Sophia knew she had lost her girlhood none the less surely for having saved her virginity, which three things had helped to guard--a clarity of pre-vision which bade her not give Richard even what he most desired, because it showed her that it must inevitably work him misery; the knowledge that he did not love her finely enough for such a gift to be fitting; and thirdly, the strongest thing of all--that no one who is accustomed, however imperfectly, to walk in the spiritual world, can lightly forgo the privilege. "I should have been afraid of losing touch," Sophia said long after, when she saw how that fear had constrained her. Now, looking at Santa Beata and realizing more vividly than ever before the power which virginity, as an idea, has always swayed, she felt she had forfeited, by her gain in experience, communion with those who were still virginal in soul as well as in body. On the steps of the church she passed some children playing--children still at the age when their heads are very big and round--and she remembered how, in a half-ruined castle Richard and she had visited together, two little peasant girls, clear-eyed, freckled young creatures, had taken them for husband and wife; and how one demanded shyly whether she had a baby at home. "No, I have no baby," Sophia had said quietly, and the child replied: "What a pity! He would be sweet, your baby. . . ."