A glow of pleasure flushed Virginia's sharpened features, mounting to the thin little curls on her forehead. These little curls, to which she sentimentally clung in spite of the changes in the fashions, were a cause of ceaseless worry to Lucy, who had developed into a "stylish" girl, and would have died sooner than she would have rejected the universal pompadour of the period. It was the single vanity that Virginia had ever permitted herself, this adhering at middle-age to the quaint and rather coquettish hairdressing of her girlhood: and Fate had punished her by threading the little curls with grey, while Susan's stiff roll (she had adopted the newer mode) remained bravely flaxen. But Susan was one of those women who, lacking a fine fair skin and defying tradition, are physically at their best between forty and fifty. "Oliver used to be so romantic," said Virginia, as she had said so often to herself, while the glow paled slowly from her cheeks, leaving them the colour of faded rose-leaves. "Not so romantic as you were, Jinny." "Oh, I am still," she laughed softly. "Lucy says I take more interest in her lovers now than she does," and she added after a minute, "Girls are so different to-day from what they used to be--they are so much less sentimental." "But I thought Lucy was. She has enough flirtations for her age, hasn't she?" "She has enough attention, of course--for the funny part is that, though she's only sixteen and not nearly so pretty as Jenny, the men are all crazy, as Miss Willy says, about her. But, somehow, it's different. Lucy enjoys it, but it isn't her life. As for Jenny, she's still too young to have taken shape, I suppose, but she has only one idea in her head and that is going to college. She never gives a boy a thought." "That's queer, because she promises already to be the most beautiful girl in Dinwiddie." "She is beautiful. I am quite sure that it isn't because she is my daughter that I think so. But, all the same, I'm afraid she'll never be as popular as Lucy is. She is so distant and overbearing to men that they are shy of her." "And you'll let her go to college?" "If we can afford it--and now that Oliver hopes to get one of his plays put on, we may have a little more money. But it seems such a waste to me. I never saw that it could possibly do a woman any good to go to college--though of course I always sympathized with your disappointment, dear Susan. Jenny is bent on it now, but I feel so strongly that it would be better for her to come out in Dinwiddie and go to parties and have attention." "And does Oliver feel that, too?" "Oh, he doesn't care. Jenny is his favourite, and he will let her do anything he thinks she has set her heart on. But he has never put his whole life into the children's as I have done." "But if she goes, will you be able to send Harry?"