Rosedale was, indeed, Eden in the most orthodox sense to the group so strangely billeted in its lovely tranquillity.  No sooner was the anguish concerning the invalids off Kate’s, Olympia’s, and Rosa’s minds, than new perplexities beset them.  Rosa was barely eighteen, Kate and Olympia older by three or four years, but the younger girl was in many essential things quite as mature as her Northern comrades.  But Jack could not comprehend this, and quite innocently did and said things to arouse the young girl’s dreams.  I think I have said that Jack was a very comely fellow?  He was big and brawny, and tireless in good-humor, and the attractive little gallantries that women adore.  He looked as sentimentally sincere, uttering a paradox, as another vowing eternal fidelity.  He gave every woman the impression that his mind was lost wondering how he should exist until she gave him the right to call her his own.  Though, as a matter of fact, it is the man who is the woman’s own—­when the final word comes.

Rosa was not long in discovering Vincent’s happy tumult in Olympia’s presence, and she secretly misunderstood Jack the more that he was so lavish and open in his adulations.  If he rode, he exhausted eulogy in describing her pose, her daring, her skill; if they danced, as they did nearly every night until poor Merry’s fingers ached from drumming the unholy strains of Faust, Strauss, and what not, in the old-fashioned waltzes—­he pantingly declared that she made the music seem a celestial choir by her lightness; in long walks in the rose-fields he exhausted a not very laborious store of botanical conceits, to make her cheeks resemble the roses.  This assurance, this recklessness, this aplomb, quite bewildered the girl, who posed in Richmond for a passed mistress of flirting.  She had, unless rumor was badly at fault, jilted an appalling list of the striplings who believed that beard-growing and love-making were conventionally contemporaneous events.  But they had “mooned” about her and made themselves absurd in vain, while this unconscious Adonis calmly walked, talked, and acted as if she could know nothing else than love him, and one day she started in delicious misery to find that she did—­that is, she thought she might if—­if?  But there her dreams became nebulous—­they were rosy in outline, however, and she was content to rest there.

The morning after the coming of the cavalry-troop, Wesley was discussing the never-ending theme of how he was going to get home—­with Kate busy arranging the ferns she had brought from the swamp.

“Really, Wesley, just now you ought to be content.  There is no likelihood of any movement; besides, philosophy is as much a merit in a soldier as valor—­it is valor, it is endurance.  You complain of your unhappy fate, housed here with a lot of women and idlers.  How would you bear up in Libby Prison?  There are as good men as you there, my dear; shall I say better or older soldiers, Brutus?  You may take your choice, and ‘count on a sister’s blind partiality to justify you!’”