a broad
glare and a beaten road. It prefers shadows which you can cut out with a
knife. It doesn't know the beauty of this Virginia winter softness."

Mrs. Lee resented the charge. America, she maintained, had not worn her
feelings threadbare like Europe. She had still her story to tell; she
was waiting for her Burns and Scott, her Wordsworth and Byron, her
Hogarth and Turner. "You want peaches in spring," said she. "Give us
our thousand years of summer, and then complain, if you please, that our
peach is not as mellow as yours. Even our voices may be soft then," she
added, with a significant look at Lord Skye.

"We are at a disadvantage in arguing with Mrs. Lee," said he to
Ratcliffe; "when she ends as counsel, she begins as witness. The famous
Duchess of Devonshire's lips were not half as convincing as Mrs. Lee's
voice."

Ratcliffe listened carefully, assenting whenever he saw that Mrs. Lee
wished it. He wished he understood precisely what tones and half-tones,
colours and harmonies, were.

They arrived and strolled up the sunny path. At the tomb they halted,
as all good Americans do, and Mr. Gore, in a tone of subdued sorrow,
delivered a short address--

"It might be much worse if they improved it," he said, surveying its
proportions with the aesthetic eye of a cultured Bostonian. "As it
stands, this tomb is a simple misfortune which might befall any of us;
we should not grieve over it too much. What would our feelings be if
a Congressional committee reconstructed it of white marble with Gothic
pepper-pots, and gilded it inside on machine-moulded stucco!"

Madeleine, however, insisted that the tomb, as it stood, was the only
restless spot about the quiet landscape, and that it contradicted all
her ideas about repose in the grave. Ratcliffe wondered what she meant.

They passed on, wandering across the lawn, and through the house. Their
eyes, weary of the harsh colours and forms of the city, took pleasure in
the worn wainscots and the stained walls. Some of the rooms were still
occupied; fires were burning in the wide fire-places. All were tolerably
furnished, and there was no uncomfortable sense of repair or newness.
They mounted the stairs, and Mrs. Lee fairly laughed when she was shown
the room in which General Washington slept, and where he died.

Carrington smiled too. "Our old Virginia houses were mostly like this,"
said he; "suites of great halls below, and these gaunt barracks above.
The Virginia hou