meet Ray's objections.

They were up at the little meadow-side cottage of Mrs. Vennard, Ray's
maternal aunt, a quiet widow, who was glad to receive her dying sister
in her house a year and a half ago, as she had often received her boys
before, and who was still willing to eke out her narrow income with the
board of one nephew and any summer guest; and as that summer guest,
owing to an old family-friendship that overlooked differences of rank
and wealth, Vivia had, for many a season, been established. Here, when
bodings of trouble began to darken her sunny fields, she had, in early
spring, withdrawn again, leaving her maiden aunt to attend to the
affairs of the homestead, or to find more luxurious residence in
watering-places or cities, as she chose. For Vivia liked the placid life
and freedom of the cottage, and here, too, she had oftenest met those
dear friends to whom one winter her father, long since dead, had taken
her, and half of all that was pleasant in her life had inwoven itself
with the simple surroundings of the place. Here, in that fatal spring
when the first tocsin alarmed the land, Ray, now scarcely any longer a
boy, yet with a boy's singleness of mind, though possessing neither
patience nor power for subtilties of difficult reason and truth,
thinking of no lonely portion, but of the one great fact of country, had
been fired with spontaneous fervor, and had ever since been like some
restive steed champing the bit and quivering to start. As for Vivia, she
was a Maryland woman. Too burningly indignant, the blood bubbled in her
heart for words sometimes, and she would be glad of Beltran's weapons
with which to confront Kay when he returned from Boston, whither, the
day before, without a word's explanation, he had betaken himself. So she
turned again to the open letter, and scanned its weightiest paragraphs.

"There is a strange reversal of right and wrong, when the American Peace
Society declares itself for war. There is, then, a greater evil than
war, even than civil war, with its red, fratricidal hands?--Slavery.
But, could that be destroyed, it would be the first great evil ever
overcome by force of arms. They fight tangibly with an intangible foe;
tangible issues rise between them; the black, intangible phantom hovers
safe behind. But even should they visibly succeed, is there not left the
very root of the matter to put forth fresh growth,--that moral condition
in which the thing lived at all? An evil th