ern women, till
the announcement in the marriage column that the fathers of bride and
bridegroom had fought in opposing armies at the battle of Manassas had
grown as hackneyed as the stereotyped "Whither are we drifting?"
editorial. But was Virginia herself anything more, in this twentieth
century, than a hot-blooded, high-handed, prodigal legend, kept alive
in the North by the banquets of "Southern Societies" and annual poems on
"The Lost Cause"?

He picked up the newspaper clipping. It was worn and broken in the folds
as if it had been carried for months in a pocketbook.

"It will interest readers of this section of Virginia (the
paragraph began) to learn, from a recent transfer received for
record at the County Clerk's Office, that Damory Court has
passed to Mr. John Valiant, minor--"

He turned the paper over and found a date; it had been printed in the
year of the transfer to himself, when he was six years old--the year his
father had died.

"--John Valiant, minor, the son of the former owner.

"There are few indeed who do not recall the tragedy with which
in the public mind the estate is connected. The fact, moreover,
that this old homestead has been left in its present state
(for, as is well known, the house has remained with all its
contents and furnishings untouched) to rest during so long a
term of years unoccupied, could not, of course, fail to be
commented on, and this circumstance alone has perhaps tended to
keep alive a melancholy story which may well be forgotten."

He read the elaborate, rather stilted phraseology in the twenty-year-old
paper with a wondering interest. "An old house," he mused, "with a bad
name. Probably he couldn't sell it, and maybe nobody would even live in
it. That would explain why it remained so long unoccupied--why there are
no records of rentals. Probably the land was starved and run down. At
any rate, in twenty years it would be overgrown with stubble."

Yet, whatever their condition, acres of land were, after all, a tangible
thing. This lawyer's firm might, instead, have sent him a bundle of
beautifully engraved certificates of stock in some zinc-mine whose
imaginary bottom had dropped out ten years ago. Here was real property,
in size, at least, a gentleman's domain, on which real taxes had been
paid during a long term--a sort of hilarious consolation prize, hurtling
to him out of the void like the magic