“Law, Jinny, you’re quite pretty,” said her aunt

“I hadn’t realized it—­but you must take care of your complexion.  You’re horribly sunburned, and you let your hair blow all over your face.  It’s barbarous not to wear a mask when you ride.  Your Pa doesn’t look after you properly.  I would ask you to stay to the dance to-night if your skin were only white, instead of red.  You’re old enough to know better, Virginia.  Mr. Vance was to have driven out for dinner.  Have you seen him, Clarence?”

“No, mother.”

“He is so amusing,” Mrs. Colfax continued, “and he generally brings candy.  I shall die of the blues before supper.”  She sat down with a grand air at the head of the table, while Alfred took the lid from the silver soup-tureen in front of her.  “Jinny, can’t you say something bright?  Do I have to listen to Clarence’s horse talk for another hour?  Tell me some gossip.  Will you have some gumbo soup?”

“Why do you listen to Clarence’s horse talk?” said Virginia.  “Why don’t you make him go to work!”

“Mercy!” said Mrs. Colfax, laughing, “what could he do?”

“That’s just it,” said Virginia.  “He hasn’t a serious interest in life.”

Clarence looked sullen.  And his mother, as usual, took his side.

“What put that into your head, Jinny,” she said.  “He has the place here to look after, a very gentlemanly occupation.  That’s what they do in Virginia.”

“Yes,” said Virginia, scornfully, “we’re all gentlemen in the South.  What do we know about business and developing the resources of the country?  Not that.”

“You make my head ache, my dear,” was her aunt’s reply.  “Where did you get all this?”

“You ask me because I am a girl,” said Virginia.  “You believe that women were made to look at, and to play with,—­not to think.  But if we are going to get ahead of the Yankees, we shall have to think.  It was all very well to be a gentleman in the days of my great-grandfather.  But now we have railroads and steamboats.  And who builds them?  The Yankees.  We of the South think of our ancestors, and drift deeper and deeper into debt.  We know how to fight, and we know how to command.  But we have been ruined by—­” here she glanced at the retreating form of Alfred, and lowered her voice, “by niggers.”

Mrs. Colfax’s gaze rested languidly on her niece’s faces which glowed with indignation.

“You get this terrible habit of argument from Comyn,” she said.  “He ought to send you to boarding-school.  How mean of Mr. Vance not to come!  You’ve been talking with that old reprobate Whipple.  Why does Comyn put up with him?”

“He isn’t an old reprobate,” said Virginia, warmly.

“You really ought to go to school,” said her aunt.  “Don’t be eccentric.  It isn’t fashionable.  I suppose you wish Clarence to go into a factory.”

“If I were a man,” said Virginia, “and going into a factory would teach me how to make a locomotive or a cotton press, or to build a bridge, I should go into a factory.  We shall never beat the Yankees until we meet them on their own ground.”