"What an extraordinary young man!" said Mrs. Pendleton's eyes; and Virginia found herself blushing again because she felt that her mother had not understood him. A delicious embarrassment--something different and more vivid than any sensation she had ever known--held her speechless while he looked at her. Had her life depended on it, she could not have uttered a sentence--could hardly even have lifted her lashes, which seemed suddenly to have become so heavy that she felt the burden of them weighing over her eyes. All the picturesque phrases she had planned to speak at their first meeting had taken wings with perfidious romance, yet she would have given her dearest possession to have been able to say something really clever. "He thinks me a simpleton, of course," she thought--perfectly unconscious that Oliver was not thinking of her wits at all, but of the wonderful rose-pink of her flesh. At one and the same instant, she felt that this silence was the most marvellous thing that had ever happened to her and longed to break it with some speech so brilliant that he would never forget it. Little thrills of joy, like tiny flames, ran over her, and the light in her eyes shone on him through the quivering dusk of her lashes. Even when she looked away from him, she could still see his expression of tender gaiety, as though he were trying in vain to laugh himself free from an impulse that was fast growing too strong for him. What she did not know was that the spring was calling to him through her youth and sex as it was calling through the scented winds and the young buds on the trees. She was as ignorant that she offered herself to him through her velvet softness, through the glow in her eyes, through her quivering lips, as the flower is that it allures the bee by its perfume. So subtly did Life use her for its end that the illusion of choice in first love remained unimpaired. Though she was young desire incarnate, he saw in her only the unique and solitary woman of his dreams. "Do you come here every day?" he asked, and immediately the blue sky and the octagonal market spun round at his voice. As nothing but commonplace words would come to her, she was obliged at last to utter them. "Oh, no, not every day." "I've always had a tremendous sympathy for women because they have to market and housekeep. I wonder if they won't revolt some time?"