She took Sylvia to her bosom, as it were.  “Let us sit on the fence and enjoy this spectacle!  My dear, you can have no idea what an uproar you are making!  The young married women gather in their boudoirs and whisper ghastly secrets to each other; some of them are sure they have it, and some of them say they can trust their husbands—­as if any man could be trusted as far as you can throw a bull by the horns!  Did you hear about poor Mrs. Pattie Peyton, she has the measles, but she sent for a specialist, and vowed she had something else—­she had read about it, and knew all the symptoms, and insisted on having elaborate blood-tests!  And little Mrs. Stanley Pendleton has left her husband, and everybody says that’s the reason.  The men are simply shivering in their boots—­they steal into the doctor’s offices by the back-doors, and a whole car-load of the boys have been shipped off to Hot Springs to be boiled—­” And so on, while Mrs. Armistead revelled in the sensation of strolling down Main Street with Mrs. Douglas van Tuiver!

Then Sylvia would go home, and get the newest reactions of the family to these horrors.  Aunt Nannie, it seemed, made the discovery that Basil, junr., her fifth son, was carrying on an intrigue with a mulatto girl in the town; and she forbade him to go to Castleman Hall, for fear lest Sylvia should worm the secret out of him; also she shipped Lucy May off to visit a friend, and came and tried to persuade Mrs. Chilton to do the same with Peggy and Maria, lest Sylvia should somehow corrupt these children.

The bishop came, having been ordered to preach religion to his wayward niece.  Poor dear Uncle Basil—­he had tried preaching religion to Sylvia many years ago, and never could do it because he loved her so well that with all his Seventeenth Century theology he could not deny her chance of salvation.  Now the first sight that met his eyes when he came to see her was his little blind grand-niece.  And also he had in his secret heart the knowledge that he, a rich and gay young planter before he became converted to Methodism, had played with the fire of vice, and been badly burned.  So Sylvia did not find him at all the Voice of Authority, but just a poor, hen-pecked, unhappy husband of a tyrannous Castleman woman.

The next thing was that “Miss Margaret” took up the notion that a time such as this was not one for Sylvia’s husband to be away from her.  What if people were to say that they had separated?  There were family consultations, and in the midst of them there came word that van Tuiver was called North upon business.  When the family delegations came to Sylvia, to insist that she go with him, the answer they got was that if they could not let her stay quietly at home without asking her any questions, she would go off to New York and live with a divorced woman Socialist!

“Of course, they gave up,” she wrote me.  “And half an hour ago poor dear mamma came to my room and said:  ’Sylvia, dear, we will let you do what you want, but won’t you please do one small favour for me?’ I got ready for trouble, and asked what she wanted.  Her answer was:  ‘Won’t you go with Celeste to the Young Matrons’ Cotillion tomorrow night, so that people won’t think there’s anything the matter?’”