By the end of October they returned to town, Jack, and Edith with a new and delicate attractiveness, and young Fletcher Delancy the most wonderful and important personage probably who came to town that season.  It seemed to Edith that his advent would be universally remarked, and Jack felt relieved when the boy was safely housed out of the public gaze.  Yes, to Edith’s inexpressible joy it was a boy, and while Jack gallantly said that a girl would have suited him just as well, he was conscious of an increased pride when he announced the sex to his friends.  This undervaluation of women at the start is one of the mysteries of life.  And until women themselves change their point of view, it is to be feared that legislation will not accomplish all that many of them wish.

“So it is a boy.  I congratulate you,” was the exclamation of Major Fairfax the first time Jack went down to the Union.

“I’m glad, Major, to have your approval.”

“Oh, it’s what is expected, that’s all.  For my part, I prefer girls.  The announcement of boys is more expensive.”

Jack understood, and it turned out in all the clubs that he had hit upon the most expensive sex in the view of responding to congratulations.

“It used to seem to me,” said the Major, “that I must have a male heir to my estates.  But, somehow, as the years go on, I feel more like being an heir myself.  If I had married and had a boy, he would have crowded me out by this time; whereas, if it had been a girl, I should no doubt have been staying at her place in Lenox this summer instead of being shipwrecked on that desert island.  There is nothing, my dear boy, like a girl well invested.”

“You speak with the feelings of a father.”

“I speak, sir, from observation.  I look at society as it is, not as it would be if we had primogeniture and a landed aristocracy.  A daughter under our arrangements is more likely to be a comfort to her parent in his declining years than a son.”

“But you seem, Major, to have preferred a single life?”

“Circumstances—­thank you, just a drop more—­we are the creatures of circumstances.  It is a long story.  There were misrepresentation and misunderstanding.  It is true, sir, that at that time my property was encumbered, but it was not unproductive.  She died long ago.  I have reason to believe that her married life was not happy.  I was hot-blooded in those days, and my honor was touched, but I never blamed her.  She was, at twenty, the most beautiful woman in Virginia.  I have never seen her equal.”

This was more than the Major had ever revealed about his private life before.  He had created an illusion about himself which society accepted, and in which he lived in apparent enjoyment of metropolitan existence.  This was due to a sanguine temperament and a large imagination.  And he had one quality that made him a favorite—­a hearty enjoyment of the prosperity of others.  With regard to himself, his imagination was creative, and Jack could not now tell whether this “most beautiful woman of Virginia” was not evoked by the third glass, about which the Major remarked, as he emptied it, that only this extraordinary occasion could justify such an indulgence at this time of day.