“I have had a mean life; but it isn’t over yet, and I may make something better of the rest of it,” she thought.  “At least I have fighting blood in my veins, and I will never give up.  After all, even if my life has been mean, I haven’t been—­and that is what really counts in the end.  If I haven’t been happy, I have tried to be gallant—­and it takes courage to be gallant with an aching heart—­”

As she fastened the long string of pearls—­one of Kent Page’s early gifts—­she drew back from the mirror, with the light of philosophy, if not of happiness, overflowing her eyes.  With her grace and her radiance she stood for the flower of the Virginian aristocratic tradition; with her sincerity and her fearlessness she embodied the American democratic ideal.  Her forefathers had brought representative government to the New World.  They had sat in the first General Assembly ever summoned in America; and through the generations they had fought always on the side of liberty tempered by discipline, of democracy exalted by patriotism.  They had stood from the beginning for dignity, for manners, for the essence of social culture which places art at the service of life.  Always they had sought to preserve the finer lessons of the past; always they had struggled against the tyranny of mediocrity, the increasing cult of the second best.  From this source, from the inherited instinct for selection, for elimination, from the inbred tendency toward order and suavity of living, Corinna had derived her clear-eyed acceptance of life, her nobility of mind, her loveliness and grace of body.  She had been prepared and nurtured for beauty, only to bloom in an age when beauty had been bartered for usefulness.  Would the delicate discriminations in which she had been trained, the lights and shadows of her soul, become submerged in the modern effort to reduce all distinctions to a level, all diversities to an average?

Turning away from the mirror, Corinna glanced over the charming room, with the wood fire, the white bearskin rug, the ivory bed draped in blue silk, the long windows opening on the garden terrace and the starlit darkness.  There had been luxury always.  Money she had had in abundance; yet there had been no hour in the last twenty years when she would not have exchanged it all—­everything that money could bring her—­for the dinner of herbs where love was.  She had possessed everything except the one thing she had wanted.  She had served the tin gods in temples of gold and jade.  With the deep instinct for perfection in her blood, she had spent her life in an endless compromise with the inferior.

“Was there something lacking in me?” she asked now of her glowing reflection.  “Was there some vital spark left out when I was born?  And to-night?  Why should I care how it goes?  What is Rose Stribling to me or I to her?” Why should she still cherish that dull resentment, that smothered sense of injury in her heart?  Was it the burden of her inheritance, the weakness of the