The embarrassment which I always felt in her presence became suddenly as acute as physical soreness, and the blush in her face served only to illuminate her consciousness of my difference, of my roughness, of the fact that externally, at least, I had never managed to shake myself free from a resemblance to the market boy who had once brought his basket of potatoes to the door of this very house. The "magnificent animal," I knew, had never appealed to her except as it was represented in horse-flesh; and yet the "magnificent animal" was what in her eyes I must ever remain. I looked at George, leaning against a white column, and his appearance of perfect self-sufficiency, his air of needing nothing, changed my embarrassment into a smothered sensation of anger. And as in the old days of my first great success, this anger brought with it, through some curious association of impulses, a fierce, almost a frenzied, desire for achievement. Here, in the little world of tradition and sentiment, I might show still at a disadvantage, but outside, in the open, I could respond freely to the lust for power, to the passion for supremacy, which stirred my blood. Turning, with a muttered excuse about letters to read, I went into the house, and closed my study door behind me with a sense of returning to a friendly and familiar atmosphere. Through the rest of the year Sally devoted herself with energy to the cultivation of flowers; but when the following spring opened, after a hard winter, she seemed to have grown listless and indifferent, and when I spoke of the garden, she merely shook her head and pointed to an unworked border at the foot of the grey-wall. "I can't make anything grow, Ben. All those brown sticks down there are the only signs of the bulbs I set out last autumn with my own hands. Nothing comes up as it ought to." "Perhaps you need pipes like the doctor," I suggested. "Oh, no, that would uproot the old shrubs, and besides, I am tired of it, I think." She was lying on the couch in her sitting-room, a pile of novels on a table beside her, and the delicacy in her appearance, the transparent fineness of her features, of her hands, awoke in me the feeling of anxiety I had felt so often during the year after little Benjamin's death. "I'm sorry I can't get up to luncheon now, darling, but we are making a big railroad deal. What have you been doing all day long by yourself?" She looked up at me, and I remembered the face of Miss Matoaca, as I had seen it against the red firelight on the afternoon when Sally and I had gone in to tell her of our engagement. "I didn't go out," she answered. "It was raining so hard that I stayed by the fire." "You've been lying here all day alone?" "Bonny Page came in for a few minutes." "Have you read?" "No, I've been thinking." "Thinking of what, sweetheart?" "Oh, so many things. You've come up again, haven't you, Ben, splendidly! Luck is with you, the General says, and whatever you touch prospers."