XLI “After Long Grief and Pain.” 234 VIOLA’S VANITY CHAPTER I. “LIGHTLY WON IS LIGHTLY LOST.” When the viols played their best, Lamps above and laughs below, “Love me,” sounded like a jest, Fit for _yes_ or fit for _no_. --MRS. BROWNING. In the early spring of 1896, the morning papers of Washington, and afterwards every journal of any consequence in the United States, one day contained the following news item under the glaring headlines: SOCIETY BELLE ELOPES. VAGARIES OF A BEAUTY. The Daughter of a High Government Official in Washington, Chief of an Important Bureau.--The Handsomest Girl in Society.--A Charming Coquette, Who Has Refused Scores of Eligibles, Jilts a Distinguished Member of Congress on the Very Eve of Her Bridal for the Sake of a Poor Young Journalist, Rolfe Maxwell, Whom She Secretly Preferred. Fashionable society, which expected to get on its best togs today for the grand noon wedding of Congressman Desha and the lovely Miss Viola Van Lew, will stand aghast at learning that the marriage is off. The young beauty, assuming the prerogative of woman to change her mind, left her prospective bridegroom in the lurch last evening, and eloped with a poor young man not in her set. The marriage ceremony was solemnized last night at the rectory of All Souls’ Church by the genial rector, from whom these facts were gleaned by our reporter. It is understood that the jilted bridegroom is _désolé_, and the astonished father furious and unforgiving, but as the eloping bride inherits on her marriage the fortune of her deceased mother, she can afford to snap her jeweled fingers in papa’s irate face. Behind this flippant announcement lay a thrilling romance of beauty, coquetry, love, and pride that may interest the amiable reader whose heart is yet young and warm enough to admire the good traits, excuse the follies, and sympathize with the dire misfortunes of a beautiful, thoughtless young girl. If there was any excuse in the world for what Viola did, it lay in her youth and her thoughtlessness, and because she did not understand at all what a terrible force love is at its best or worst. She had only heard of the grand passion in its lightest phases as it is pictured by merry young school-girls boasting to each other of their conquests, and it was plain to be seen that “the one with the most strings to her bow” was more envied than any other. They made “nets, not cages.” She had the tenderest heart in the world. She would not have injured the smallest living thing, yet she had never heard that love is a flame that burns, and that one may carry its scars to the grave. They should have taught her that, those who guided her young life, for she had the fatal gift of beauty coupled with that subtle fascination that draws men’s hearts as plants turn their leaves to the sun.