e that you are just reacting in every crisis to the cramped puritanism
you once denounced?"

"Puritanism!" she exclaimed, and the gentle manner of her speech
stiffened suddenly into a timbre more militant.

"Call it what you like. Yes, I _am_ a puritan woman, Stuart, and I thank
God for the heritage--if I am always to have to fight these battles
against passionate rebellion. I know puritanism now for what it is. I
guess Christ might have been called a puritan, when Satan took him up on
the high mountain and offered him the world." She paused only a moment,
then swept on with the fervor of an ultimatum. "And since you choose to
put it that way," she looked at him with eyes full of challenge, "I mean
to stay the puritan woman. You've come with your southern fire and the
voluptuous voice of your southern pleading, to unsettle me and make me
surrender my code. You can't do it, Stuart. I love you, but I can still
fight you! If that's the difference between us--the difference between
puritan and cavalier--there's still a line that mustn't be crossed. To
cross it means war. If you fire on Fort Sumpter, Fort Sumpter can still
fire back."

"How am I firing on Fort Sumpter?" he asked and she quickly responded.
"You're assailing my powers of endurance. You're trying to make me take
the easy course of putting desire above duty. You're trying to make me
forget the ideals of the men at Valley Forge--the things that your
ancestors and mine fought for when they went to war to build a nation:
before they fought each other to disrupt one--loyalty and
steadfastness!"

"Conscience," he said with the momentary ghost of a smile, "you are
speaking from your father's pulpit. That is all an excellent New England
sermon--and about as logical."

"At least it's sincere," she retorted, "and I think sincerity is what I
need most just now."

The kindled glow of the woman turned fighter gave an enhanced beauty to
the face into which the Virginian looked.

"Now certainly," he declared, "I shall not go. You say I have fired on
Fort Sumpter--very well, I'll fight it out. You accuse me of assaulting
your duty, but I'm trying to rouse you to a bigger conception of duty. I
see in this idea to which you are sacrificing yourself as distorted a
sense of honor as the suttee's, who ascends her husband's funeral pyre
and wraps herself in a blanket of fire. I see in it, too, the dishonor
of a woman's giving her body to one man while her heart belongs to
a