“So she told me when I was down home.  You ain’t looking a bit well, Gabriella.  You’ve got exactly the look Miss Letty Marshall had before she came down with heart complaint.  The doctors were fussin’ over her for weeks before they could find out what the trouble was, but I said all along it wan’t nothin’ in the world but a bruised heart, and sure enough that was just what they found out was the matter.  You ain’t had a feelin’ of heart burn after you eat, have you?  Sometimes it don’t take you that way, though; you just begin to have palpitations when you go up and down stairs and then you start to wakin’ up in the night with shortness of breath.  That’s the way my Aunt Lydy had it.  You know I nursed her till she died, and I’ve seen her get right black in the face when she stooped to pick up a pin.  It’s her daughter Lydy that’s waiting on old Mrs. Peyton now.  You know Mrs. Peyton was feelin’ kind of run down so her son Arthur—­I call him Arthur to his face because I used to sew there when he wan’t more’n knee high—­well, Arthur said she’d have to have somebody to wait on her every minute and she thought she’d rather have Lydy than anybody else because Lydy was always so handy in a sickroom.  That was six months ago, and Lydy’s been stayin’ on there ever since.  She says there ain’t anybody on earth like Mr. Arthur, and she never could make out why you didn’t marry him.  He ain’t ever had an eye for anybody but you, and he’s got yo’ picture—­the one in the white dress—­on his bureau and he keeps a rose in a vase before it all the time.  That ain’t much like a man, but then there always was a heap of a girl in Arthur in little ways, wan’t there?”

“I wonder why I didn’t marry him?” said Gabriella softly; and not until Miss Polly answered her, was she aware that she had spoken aloud.  In her spiritual reaction from the grosser reality of passion, the delicacy and remoteness of Arthur’s love borrowed the pious and mystic qualities of religious worship.  She had seen the sordid and ugly sides of sex; and she felt now a profound disgust for the emotion which drew men and women together—­for the light in the eyes, the touch of the lips, the clinging of the hands.  Once she had idealized these things into love itself; now the very memory of them filled her with repulsion.  She still wanted love, but a love so pure, so disembodied, so ethereal that it was liberated from the dominion of flesh.  In the beginning, as a girl, she had accepted love as the supreme good, as the essential reality; now, utterly disillusioned, she asked herself:  “What is there left in life?  What is the thing that really counts, after all?  What is the possession that makes all the striving worth while in the end?  At twenty-seven love is over for me, and if love is over, what remains to fill the rest of my life?  There must be something else—­there must be a reality somewhere which is truer, which is profounder, than love.”  This, she knew, was the question which neither tradition nor custom could answer.