The young woman who was giving the last touches to the very effective
picture framed in her long looking-glass nodded almost imperceptibly.

She had come to the parting of the ways, and she knew it, with a shrewd
suspicion as to which she would choose. She had asked for a week to
decide, and her heart-searching had told her nothing new. It was
characteristic of Virginia Balfour that she did not attempt to deceive
herself. If she married Waring Ridgway it would be for what she considered
good and sufficient reasons, but love would not be one of them. He was
going to be a great man, for one thing, and probably a very rich one,
which counted, though it would not be a determining factor. This she could
find only in the man himself, in the masterful force that made him what he
was. The sandstings of life did not disturb his confidence in his
victorious star, nor did he let fine-spun moral obligations hamper his
predatory career. He had a genius for success in whatever he undertook,
pushing his way to his end with a shrewd, direct energy that never
faltered. She sometimes wondered whether she, too, like the men he used as
tools, was merely a pawn in his game, and her consent an empty formality
conceded to convention. Perhaps he would marry her even if she did not
want to, she told herself, with the sudden illuminating smile that was one
of her chief charms.

But Ridgway's wary eyes, appraising her mood as she came forward to meet
him, read none of this doubt in her frank greeting. Anything more sure and
exquisite than the cultivation Virginia Balfour breathed he would have
been hard put to it to conceive. That her gown and its accessories seemed
to him merely the extension of a dainty personality was the highest
compliment he could pay her charm, and an entirely unconscious one.