In His Steps

Rachel Winslow and Virginia Page meet the day after the Sunday of the pledge for lunch to continue the discussion they began the previous day. Rachel informs Virginia that she is going to refuse an offer for a place in a traveling opera because she cannot reconcile it with the pledge as an action that Jesus himself would take or condone. Virginia commiserates and expresses her dissatisfaction with the life she is leading and the lives that her peers are leading, growing angry at the great class divide that she sees. As a woman of considerable wealth, Virginia is caught in trying to determine how to handle her own affluence in a way that is honorable.

Virginia’s brother, Rollin, invites himself to lunch, along with Virginia’s mother, Madame Florence Page. He proceeds to embarrass Rachel by revealing, to the table, Rachel’s offer of a place in the opera (an offer that had been a private affair). When the conversation veers off to the events at Church on Sunday, however, Rollin excuses himself and appears only afterwards when Rachel is on her way home. Expressing his long-held love for her, an infatuation since childhood, Rollin makes a proposal of marriage to Rachel, which she promptly refuses on the grounds that she does not love him: “Well, I do not and cannot love you because you have no purpose in life.