“Many of us,” I began, “who have watched the soiling touch of politics make dirty one clean thing after another, would not be wholly desolated to learn that the Grand Army of the Republic had gone to another world to sing its songs and draw its pensions.”

She looked astonished, and then she laughed.  Down in the South here she was too far away to feel the vile uses to which present politics had turned past heroism.

“But,” I continued, “we haven’t any Daughters of the Union banded together and handing it down.”

“It?” she echoed.  “Well, if the deeds of your heroes are not a sacred trust to you, don’t invite us, please, to resemble you.”

I waited for more, and a little more came.

“We consider Northerners foreigners, you know.”

Again I felt that hurt which hearing the ode had given me, but I now knew how I was going to take it, and where we were presently coming out; and I knew she didn’t mean quite all that—­didn’t mean it every day, at least—­ and that my speech had driven her to saying it.

“No, Miss La Heu; you don’t consider Northerners, who understand you, to be foreigners.”

“We have never met any of that sort.”

("Yes,” I thought, “but you really want to.  Didn’t you say you hoped I was one?  Away down deep there’s a cry of kinship in you; and that you don’t hear it, and that we don’t hear it, has been as much our fault as yours.  I see that very well now, but I’m afraid to tell you so, yet.”)

What I said was:  “We’re handing the ‘sacred trust’ down, I hope.”

“I understood you to say you weren’t.”

“I said we were not handing ‘it’ down.”

I didn’t wonder that irritation again moulded her reply.  “You must excuse a daughter of Dixie if she finds the words of a son of the Union beyond her.  We haven’t had so many advantages.”

There she touched what I had thought over during my wakeful hours:  the tale of the ashes, the desolate ashes!  The war had not prevented my parents from sending me to school and college, but here the old had seen the young grow up starved of what their fathers had given them, and the young had looked to the old and known their stripped heritage.

“Miss La Heu,” I said, “I could not tell you, you would not wish me to tell you, what the sight of Kings Port has made me feel.  But you will let me say this:  I have understood for a long while about your old people, your old ladies, whose faces are so fine and sad.”

I paused, but she merely looked at me, and her eyes were hard.

“And I may say this, too.  I thank you very sincerely for bringing completely home to me what I had begun to make out for myself.  I hope the Daughters of Dixie will go on singing of their heroes.”

I paused again, and now she looked away, out of the window into Royal Street.

“Perhaps,” I still continued, “you will hardly believe me when I say that I have looked at your monuments here with an emotion more poignant even than that which Northern monuments raise in me.”