him, what difficulties would she have to face with John Pentland and Anson and Aunt Cassie and the host of cousins and connections who would be marshaled to defeat her?
For she saw clearly enough that this youth for whom Sybil was waiting would never be their idea of a proper match. It would be a man with qualities which O'Hara possessed, and even Higgins, the groom. She saw perfectly why Sybil had a fondness for these two outsiders; she had come to see it more and more clearly of late. It was because they possessed a curious, indefinable solidity that the others at Pentlands all lacked, and a certain fire and vitality. Neither blood, nor circumstance, nor tradition, nor wealth, had made life for them an atrophied, empty affair, in which there was no need for effort, for struggle, for combat. They had not been lost in a haze of transcendental maunderings. O'Hara, with his career and his energy, and Higgins, with his rabbitlike love-affairs and his nearness to all that was earthy, still carried about them a sense of the great zest in life. They reached down somehow into the roots of things where there was still savor and fertility.
And as she walked along the hallway, she found herself laughing aloud over the titles of the only three books which the Pentland family had ever produced—"The Pentland Family and the Massachusetts Bay Colony" and Mr. Struthers' two books, "Cornices of Old Boston Houses" and "Walks and Talks in New England Churchyards." She thought suddenly of what Sabine had once said acidly of New England—that it was a place where thoughts were likely to grow "higher and fewer."
But she was frightened, too, because in the life of enchantment which surrounded her, the virtues of O'Hara and Higgins seemed to her the only things in the world worth possessing. She wanted desperately to be alive, as she had never been, and she knew that this, too, was what Sybil sought in
