matically and legibly all her
accounts; she drew and signed her own checks, and semi-annually
furnished for his inspection a neat balance-sheet.

As adviser, and agent for the collection of dividends and rents, the
change or renewal of investments, he maintained only a general
supervision, and left her untrammelled the use of her income. As a
dangerous innovation upon time-honored customs, which under the ante
bellum regime, had kept Southern women as ignorant of practical
business routine, as of the origin of the Weddas of Ceylon, Miss Patty
bitterly opposed and lamented her brother's decision; dismally
predicting that the result must inevitably be the transformation of
their refined, delicate, clinging "Southern lady", into that abhorred
monster--"a strong-minded independent business woman".

Intensely loyal to the social standard, usages and traditions of an
aristocracy, that throughout the South had guarded its patrician ranks
with almost Brahmin jealousy, she sternly decried every infringement of
caste custom and etiquette. Nature and education had combined to
deprive her of any adaptability to the new order of things; and she
rejected the idea that "a lady should transact business", with the same
contemptuous indignation that would have greeted a proposition to wear
"machine-sewed garments", that last resort of impecunious plebeianism.
However unwelcome Leo had found this assumption of the grave duties of
mature womanhood, she met the responsibility unflinchingly, and
gathered very firmly the reins transferred to her fair hands for
guidance. Judge Dent and Miss Patty were the last of their family,
except the orphan niece who had been left to their care, and as their
earthly possessions would ultimately descend to her, she had been
reared in the conviction that their house was her only home.

Study and travel, potent factors in the march of progress, had so
enlarged the periphery of Leo's intellectual vision, that she
frequently startled her prim aunt, by the enunciation of views much too
extended and cosmopolitan to fit that haughty dame's Procrustean limits
of "Southern ladyhood". Blessed with a discriminating governess and
chaperon, who while fostering a genuine love of the beautiful, had
endeavored to guard her pupil from straying into any of those
fashionable "art crazes", which in their ephemeral exaggeration
approach caricatures of aestheticism, Leo became deeply imbued with the
spirit of classic lite