Cousin Patty is small, rather white and thin, and she is fifty-five.  I tell you her age, because in a way it explains many things which would otherwise puzzle you.  She was born just before the war.  She knew nothing of the luxury of the days of slavery.  She has twisted and turned and economized all of her life.  She has struggled with all the problems which beset the South in Reconstruction times, and she has come out if it all, sweet and shrewd, and with a point of view about women which astonishes me, and which gives us a chance for many sprightly arguments.  Her black hair is untouched with gray, she wears it parted and in a thick knot high on her head.  Her gowns are invariably of black silk, well cut and well made.  She makes them herself, and gets her patterns from New York!  Can you see her now?

Our arguments are usually about women, and their position in the world to-day.  You know I am conservative, clinging much to old ideals, old fashions, to the beliefs of gentler times—­but Cousin Patty in this backwater of civilization has gone far ahead of me.  She believes that the hope of the South is in its women.  “They read more than the men,” she says, “and they have responded more quickly to the new social ideals.”

But of our arguments more in another letter—­this will serve, however, to introduce you to some of the astonishing mental processes of this little marooned cousin of mine.

For in a sense she is marooned.  Once upon a time when Cotton was king, and slave labor made all things possible, there was prosperity here, but now the land is impoverished.  So Cousin Patty does not depend upon the land.  She read in some of her magazines of a woman who had made a fortune in wedding cake.  She resolved that what one woman could do could be done by another.  Hence she makes and sells wedding cake, and while she has not made a fortune she has made a living.  She began by asking friends for orders; she now gets orders from near and far.

So all day there is the good smell of baking in the house, and the sound of the whisking of eggs.  And every day little boxes have to be filled.  Will you smile when I tell you that I like the filling of the little boxes?  And that while we talk o’ nights, I busy myself with this task, while Cousin Patty does things with narrow white ribbon and bits of artificial orange blossoms, so that the packages which go out may be as beautiful and bride-y as possible.

It is strange, when one thinks of it, that I came to your house on a wedding night, and here I live in a perpetual atmosphere of wedding blisses.

In the morning I write.  In the afternoon I do other things.  The weather is not cold—­it is dry and sunshiny—­windless.  I take long walks over the hills and far away.  Some of it is desolate country where the boxed pines have fallen, or where an area has been burned but one comes now and then upon groves of shimmering and shining young trees,—­is there any tree as beautiful as a young pine with the sunshine on it?