e've got a bolt of Confederate cloth and Johnny
Bates shall come out to-morrow.... All well. Knitting and watching,
watching and knitting. The house has been full of refugees--Fairfaxes
and Fauntleroys. They've gone on to Richmond, and we're alone just now.
We take turn about at the hospitals in Charlottesville--there are three
hundred sick--and we look after the servants and the place and the poor
families whose men are gone, and we read the papers over and over, every
word--and we learn letters off by heart, and we make lint, and we twist
and turn and manage, and we knit and knit and wait and wait--Here's
Julius with the wine! And your room's ready--fire and hot water, and
young Cato to take Jeames's place. Car'line is making sugar cakes, and
we shall have coffee for supper.... Hurry down, Edward, Edward
_darling_!"

Edward darling came down clean, faintly perfumed, shaven, thin,
extremely handsome and debonair. Supper went off beautifully, with the
last of the coffee poured from the urn that had not yet gone to the
Gunboat Fair, with the Greenwood ladies dressed in the best of their
last year's gowns, with flowers in Judith's hair and at Unity's throat,
with a reckless use of candles, with Julius and Tom, the dining-room
boy, duskily smiling in the background, with the spring rain beating
against the panes, with the light-wood burning on the hearth, with
Churchill and Cary and Dandridge portraits, now in shadow, now in gleam
upon the walls--with all the cheer, the light, the gracious warmth of
Home. None of the women spoke of how seldom they burned candles now, of
how the coffee had been saved against an emergency, and of the luxury
white bread was becoming. They ignored, too, the troubles of the
plantation. They would not trouble their soldier with the growing
difficulty of finding food for the servants and for the stock, of the
plough horses gone, and no seed for the sowing, of the problem it was to
clothe the men, women, and children, with osnaburgh at thirty-eight
cents a yard, with the difficulties of healing the sick, medicine having
been declared contraband of war and the home supply failing. They would
not trouble him with the makeshifts of women, their forebodings as to
shoes, as to letter paper, their windings here and there through a maze
of difficulties strange to them as a landscape of the moon. They would
learn, and it was but little harder than being in the field. Not that
they thought of it in that li