"No--no, I want to watch a while," she said, with so strange an accent of irritation that he stared at her in surprise. The suspense in her heart hurt her like a drawn cord in throbbing flesh, and she felt angry with John Henry because he was so dull that he could not see how she suffered. In the distance, under the waving gilded leaves of the poplars, she saw Abby laughing up into a man's face, and she thought: "Can he possibly be in love with Abby? Some men are mad about her, but I know he isn't. He could never like a loud woman, and, besides, he couldn't have looked at me that way if he hadn't cared." Then it seemed to her that something of the aching suspense in her own heart stole into Abby's laughing face while she watched it, and from Abby it passed onward into the faces of all the girls who were dancing on the raised platform. Suspense! Was that a woman's life, after all? Never to be able to go out and fight for what one wanted! Always to sit at home and wait, without moving a foot or lifting a hand toward happiness! Never to dare gallantly! Never even to suffer openly! Always to will in secret, always to hope in secret, always to triumph or to fail in secret. Never to be one's self--never to let one's soul or body relax from the attitude of expectancy into the attitude of achievement. For the first time, born of the mutinous longing in her heart, there came to her the tragic vision of life. The faces of the girls, whirling in white muslin to the music of the waltz, became merged into one, and this was the face of all womanhood. Love, sorrow, hope, regret, wonder, all the sharp longing and the slow waiting of the centuries--above all the slow waiting--these things were in her brief vision of that single face that looked back at her out of the whirling dance. Then the music stopped, the one face dissolved into many faces, and from among them Susan passed under the swinging lanterns and came towards her. "Oh, Jinny, where have you been hiding? I promised Oliver I would find you for him. He says he came only to look at you." The music began joyously again; the young leaves, gilded by the yellow lantern-light, danced in the warm wind as if they were seized by the spirit of melody; and from the dusk of the trellis the ravished sweetness of honeysuckle flooded the garden with fragrance. With the vanished sadness in her heart there fled the sadness in the waltz and in the faces of the girls who danced to the music. Waiting no longer seemed pain to her, for it was enriched now by the burning sweetness of fulfilment.