The Blue Castle

"I'm afraid heaven will be very dull after this past year," thought Valancy. "But perhaps one will not remember. Would that be—nice? No, no. I don't want to forget Barney. I'd rather be miserable in heaven remembering him than happy forgetting him. And I'll always remember through all eternity—that he really, really liked me."

"You forget, Moonlight, that there are different kinds of beauty. Your imagination is obsessed by the very obvious type of your cousin Olive. Oh, I've seen her—she's a stunner—but you'd never catch Allan Tierney wanting to paint her. In the horrible but expressive slang phrase, she keeps all her goods in the shop-window. But in your subconscious mind you have a conviction that nobody can be beautiful who doesn't look like Olive. Also, you remember your face as it was in the days when your soul was not allowed to shine through it.

Oh, I know. Yes, I'm 'still young'—but that's so different from young

"Isn't it better to have your heart broken than to have it wither up?" queried Valancy. "Before it could be broken it must have felt something splendid. That would be worth the pain."

She was no longer solitary. She was one of a vast sisterhood—all the women who had ever loved in the world.

"I've stayed on earth in my dreams."

Some things come by lightning flashes. Valancy had had a lightning flash.

She was no longer unimportant, little old maid Valancy Stirling. She was a woman, full of love and therefore rich and significant—justified to herself.

"Have you no sense of shame?" demanded Uncle James.

"Oh, yes. But the things I am ashamed of are not the things you are ashamed of." Valancy proceeded to rinse her dishcloth meticulously.

"Fear is the original sin," suddenly said a still, small voice away back—back—back of Valancy's consciousness. "Almost all the evil in the world has its origin in the fact that some one is afraid of something."