ouldering traditions, that
atmosphere of an all-enveloping past; good, too, to be out of the
tapestried room, away from the grave, fixed smiles of the dead Blands
and Fairfaxes and the close, sweet smell of the burning cedar. There I
dared not step with my full weight, lest I should ruthlessly tread on a
sentiment, or bring down a moth-eaten tradition upon my head. I was for
the hard, bright world, and the future; there in that cedar-scented
room, sat the two ladies, forever guarding the faded furniture and the
crumbling past. The pathetic contradiction of Miss Matoaca returned to
me, and I laughed aloud. Miss Matoaca, who worked for the emancipation
of women, while she herself was the slave of an ancestry of men who
oppressed women, and women who loved oppression! Miss Matoaca, whose
mind, long and narrow like her face, could grasp but a single idea and
reject the sequence to which it inevitably led! I wondered if she meant
to emancipate "ladies" merely, or if her principles could possibly
overleap her birthright of caste? Was she a gallant martyr to the
inequalities of sex, who still clung, trembling, to the inequalities of
society? She would go to the stake, I felt sure, for the cause of
womanhood, but she would go supported by the serene conviction that she
was "a lady." The pathos of it, and the mockery, checked the laugh in my
throat. To how many of us, after all, was it given to discern, not only
immediate effects, but universal relations as well? To the General? To
myself? What did we see except the possible opportunity, the room for
the ego, the adjustment to selfish ends? Yet our school was the world.
Should we, then, expect that little lady, with her bright eyes and her
withered roseleaf cheeks, to look farther than the scented firelight in
which she sat? I felt a tenderness for her, as I felt a tenderness for
all among whom Sally moved. The house in which she lived, the threshold
she had crossed, the servants who surrounded her, were all bathed for me
in the rosy light of her lamps. Common day did not shine there. I was
but twenty-seven, and my eyes could still find romance in the rustle of
her skirt and in the curl of her eyelash.

In the little office, where the curtains were drawn and the green-shaded
lamp already lit, I found Dr. Theophilus sitting over his evening mint
julep, the solitary dissipation in which I had ever seen him indulge.
His strong, ruddy face, with its hooked nose and illuminating smile