The splendour of her appearance, rather than the severity of her words, held me bound and speechless. She was the most beautiful woman, it was generally admitted, in all Virginia, and in her spangled gown, which fell away from her superb shoulders, there was something brilliant and barbaric about her that went like strong wine to the head. A minute later she passed on, surrounded by former discarded lovers; and before entering the drawing-room--where Sally was standing between George Bolingbroke and a man whom I did not know--I paused behind a tub of flowering azalea, and watched the brightly coloured gowns of the women as they flitted back and forth over the shining floor. It was a year since I had been out even to dine, and while I stood there, the music, the lights, and the gaily dressed, laughing women produced in me the old boyish consciousness of the disadvantage of my size, of my awkwardness, of my increasing weight. I remembered suddenly the figure of President as he had loomed on the night of our first dinner party between the feathery palm branches in the brilliantly lighted hall; and a sense of kinship with my own family, with my own past, awoke not in my thoughts, but in my body. Across the threshold, only a few steps away, I could see Sally receiving her guests in her gracious Fairfax manner, with George and the man whom I did not know at her side; and whenever George turned and spoke, as he did always at the right instant, I was struck by the perfect agreement, the fitness, in their appearance. These things that she valued--these adornments of the outside of existence--were not in my power to bestow except when they could be bought with money. How large, how heavy, I should have appeared there in George's place, which was mine. For the first time in my life a contempt for mere wealth, and for the position which the amassment of wealth confers, entered my heart. In seeking to give money had I, in reality, sacrificed the ability to give the things that she valued far more? Surrounded by the flowers and the lights and the music of the stringed instruments, I saw her in my memory framed in the long window of our bedroom on Church Hill, with the dim grey garden behind her, and the breeze, fragrant with jessamine, blowing the thin folds of her gown. Some clairvoyant insight, purchased, not by success, but by the suffering of those months, opened my eyes. What I had lost, I saw now, was Sally herself--not the outward woman, but the inner spirit, the fineness of sympathy, the quickness of understanding. The things that she could have taught me were the finer beauties of life--and these I had scorned to learn because they could not be grasped in the hands. The objective, the external, was what I had worshipped, and our real division had come, not from the accident of our different beginnings, but from the choice that had committed us to opposite ends.