First, there was the case of Tom Barksdale and Imogene Tabb—­highly satisfactory and creditable to all the parties concerned in it, but not romantic.  Tom, a sturdy young planter, who had studied law while at the University, but never practised it, being already provided for by his opulent father, had visited his relatives, the Tabbs, in August, and straightway fallen in love with the one single daughter of his second cousin—­a pretty, amiable girl, who would inherit a neat fortune at her parent’s death, and whose pedigree became identical with that of the Barksdales a couple of generations back, and was therefore unimpeachable.  The friends on both sides were enchanted; the lovers fully persuaded that they were made for one another, an opinion cordially endorsed by Mrs. Sutton, and they could confer with no higher authority.

Next came Alfred Branch and Rosa Tazewell—­incipient, but promising at this juncture, inasmuch as Rosa had lately smiled more encouragingly upon her timid wooer than she had deigned to do before they were domesticated at Ridgeley.  Mrs. Sutton did not approve of unmaidenly forwardness.  The woman who would unsought be won, would have fared ill in her esteem.  Her lectures upon the beauties and advantages of a modest, yet alluring reserve, were cut up into familiar and much-prized quotations among her disciples, and were acted upon the more willingly for the prestige that surrounded her exploits as high priestess of Hymen.  But Rosa had been too coy to Alfred’s evident devotion—­almost repellent at seasons.  Had these rebuffs not alternated with attacks of remorse, during which the exceeding gentleness of her demeanor gradually pried the crushed hopes of her adorer out of the slough, and cleansed their drooping plumes of mud, the courtship would have fallen through, ere Mrs. Sutton could bring her skill to bear upon it.  Guided, and yet soothed by her velvet rein, Rosa really seemed to become more steady.  She was assuredly more thoughtful, and there was no better sign of Cupid’s advance upon the outworks of a girl’s heart than reverie.  If her fits of musing were a shade too pensive, the experienced eye of the observer descried no cause for discouragement in this feature.  Rosa was a spoiled, wayward child, freakish and mischievous, to whom liberty was too dear to be resigned without a sigh.  By and by, she would wear her shackles as ornaments, like all other sensible and loving women.

Thus preaching to Alfred, when he confided to her the fluctuations of rapture and despair that were his lot in his intercourse with the sometimes radiant and inviting, sometimes forbidding sprite, whose wings he would fain bind with his embrace, and thus reassuring herself, when perplexed by a flash of Rosa’s native perverseness, Mrs. Sutton was sanguine that all would come right in the end.  What was to be would be, and despite the rapids in their wooing, Alfred would find in Rosa a faithful, affectionate little wife, while she could never hope to secure a better, more indulgent, and, in most respects, more eligible, partner than the Ayletts’ well-to-do, well-looking neighbor.