The last blue bow was attached to the left side of the overskirt, and while Miss Willy rose from her knees, Virginia crossed to the window and gazed up at the pale stars over the tops of the paulownias. A joy so vibrant that it was like living music swelled in her breast. She was young! She was beautiful! She was to be loved! This preternatural certainty of happiness was so complete that the chilling disappointments of the last few days had melted before it like frost in the sunlight. It was founded upon an instinct so much deeper, so much more primitive than reason, that it resisted the logic of facts with something of the exalted obstinacy with which faith has resisted the arguments of philosophy. Like all young and inexperienced creatures, she was possessed by the feeling that there exists a magnetic current of attraction between desire and the object which it desires. "Something told" her that she was meant for happiness, and the voice of this "something" was more convincing than the chaotic march of phenomena. Sorrow, decay, death--these appeared to her as things which must happen inevitably to other people, but from which she should be forever shielded by some beneficent Providence. She thought of them as vaguely as she did of the remote tragedies of history. They bore no closer relation to her own life than did the French Revolution or the beheading of Charles the First. It was natural, if sad, that Miss Willy Whitlow should fade and suffer. The world, she knew, was full of old people, of weary people, of blighted people; but she cherished passionately the belief that these people were all miserable because, somehow, they had not chosen to be happy. There appeared something positively reprehensible in a person who could go sighing upon so kind and beautiful a planet. All things, even joy, seemed to her a mere matter of willing. It was impossible that any hostile powers should withstand the radiant energy of her desire.