“Because the proof of it sits on his horse here before us.  Why should a man like George Dalton be sent to Richmond?  A sour Puritan who does not know how to enjoy a dance or anything else, who looks upon the beautiful face of a girl as a sin and an abomination, who thinks to be ugly is to be good, who is by temperament and education unfit to enjoy anything, while Thomas Langdon, who by the same measurements is fit to enjoy everything, is left here to hold back the Army of the Potomac.  It’s undoubtedly a tribute to my valor, but I don’t like it.”

“Thomas,” said Colonel Leonidas Talbot, gravely, “you’re entirely too severe with our worthy young friend, Dalton.  The bubbles of pleasure always lie beneath austere and solemn exteriors like his, seeking to break a way to the surface.  The longer the process is delayed the more numerous the bubbles are and the greater they expand.  If scandalous reports concerning a certain young man in Richmond should reach us here in the North, relating his unparalleled exploits in the giddier circles of our gay capital, I should know without the telling that it was our prim young George Dalton.”

“You never spoke truer words, Leonidas,” said Lieutenant-Colonel Hector St. Hilaire.  “A little judicious gallantry in youth is good for any one.  It keeps the temperature from going too high.  I recall now the case of Auguste Champigny, who owned an estate in Louisiana, near the Louisiana estate of the St. Hilaires, and the estates of those cousins of mine whom I visited, as I told you once.

“But pardon me.  I digress, and to digress is to grow old, so I will not digress, but remain young, in heart at least.  I go back now.  I was speaking of Auguste Champigny, who in youth thought only of making money and of making his plantation, already great, many times greater.  The blood in his veins was old at twenty-two.  He did not love the vices that the world calls such.  But yet there were times, I knew, when he would have longed to go with the young, because youth cannot be crushed wholly at twenty-two.  There was no escape of the spirits, no wholesome blood-letting, so to speak, and that which was within him became corrupt.  He acquired riches and more riches, and land and more land, and at fifty he went to New Orleans, and sought the places where pleasures abound.  But his true blossoming time had passed.  The blood in his veins now became poison.  He did the things that twenty should do, and left undone the things that fifty should do.  Ah!  Harry, one of the saddest things in life is the dissipated boy of fifty!  He should have come with us when the first blood of youth was upon him.  He could have found time then for play as well as work.  He could have rowed with us in the slender boats on the river and bayous with Mimi and Rosalie and Marianne and all those other bright and happy ones.  He could have danced, too.  It was no strain, we never danced longer than two days and two nights without stopping, and the festivals, the gay fete days, not more than one a week!  But it was not Auguste’s way.  A man when he should have been a boy, and then, alas! a boy when he should have been a man!”