She said no, and adhered to it, partly because she knew her grandfather was pining for Paradise, and partly on her own account.  Ardea at twenty was a young woman who might have made King Solomon pause with suspended pen when he was writing that saying about his inability to find one woman among a thousand.  She was not beautiful beyond compare, as the Southern young woman is so likely to be under the pencil of her loyal limners.  She had the Dabney nose, which was not quite classical, and the Courtenay mouth, well-lined and expressive, rather than too suggestive, of feminine softness.  But her eyes were beautiful, and her luxuriant masses of copper-gold hair fitted her shapely head like a glorious aureole; also, she had that indefinable adorableness called charm, and the sweet, direct, childlike frankness of speech which is its characteristic.

This was the external Ardea, known of men, and of those women who were large-minded enough not to envy her.  But the inner Ardea was a being apart—­high-seated, alone, self-sufficient in the sense that it saw too clearly to be hoodwinked, infinitely reasonable, with vision unclouded either by passion or the conventions.  This inner Ardea knew Vincent Farley better than he knew himself:  the small mind, the mask of outward correctness, the coldness of heart, the utter lack of the heroic soul-strength which, even in a brutal man, may sometimes draw and conquer and merge within itself the woman-soul that, yielding, still yields open-eyed and undeceived.

He was the most moderate of lovers, as such a man must needs be, but his anxiety to second the wishes of his father and sister was not to be misunderstood by the clear-eyed inner Ardea, whose intuition served her as a sixth sense.  She knew that sometime he would ask her to marry him; and in that region where her answer should lie she found only a vast indecision.  He was not her ideal, but the all-seeing inner self told her that she would never find the ideal.  There comes to every woman, sooner or later, the conviction that if she would marry she must take men as they are, weighing the good against the evil, choosing as she may the man whose vices may be condoned or whose virtues are great enough to overshadow them.  Ardea knew that Vincent Farley was not great in either field; but the little virtues were not to be despised.  If he were not, in the best sense of the word, well-bred, he had at least been well nurtured, well schooled in the conventions.  Ardea sighed.  It was in her to be something more than the conventional wife, yet she saw no reason to believe that she would ever be called on to be anything else.  By which it will be apparent that the sacred flame of love had not yet been kindled in her maiden heart.