nie Halliday joined the choir in Parson
Tombs's church, becoming at once its leading spirit, and John March
suddenly showed a deep interest in the Scriptures. He joined her
Sunday-school class.

X.

FANNIE

Was sixteen--she said; had black eyes--the dilating kind--was pretty,
and seductively subtle. Jeff-Jack liked her much. They met at Rosemont,
where he found her spending two or three days, on perfect terms with
Barbara, and treated with noticeable gravity, though with full kindness,
by Mrs. Garnet, whom she called, warmly, "Cousin Rose."

Ravenel had pushed forward only two or three pawns of conversation when
she moved at one step from news to politics. She played with the ugly
subject girlishly, even frivolously, though not insipidly--at least to a
young man's notion--riding its winds and waves like a sea-bird.
Politics, she said, seemed to her a kind of human weather, no more her
business and no less than any other kind. She never blamed the public,
or any party for this or that; did he? And when he said he did not, her
eyes danced and she declared she disliked him less.

"Why, we might as well scold the rain or the wind as the public," she
insisted. "What publics do, or think, or say, or want--are merely--I
don't know--sort o' chemical values. What makes you smile that way?"

"Did I smile? You're deep," he said.

"You're smiling again," she replied, and, turning, asked Garnet a
guileless question on a certain fierce matter of the hour. He answered
it with rash confidence, and her next question was a checkmate.

"Oh, understand," he cried, in reply; "we don't excuse these dreadful
practices."

"Yes, you do. You-all don't do anything else--except Mr. Ravenel; he
approves them barefaced."

Garnet tried to retort, but she laughed him down. When she was gone,
"She's as rude as a roustabout," he said to his wife.

For all this she was presently the belle of Suez. She invaded its small
and ill-assorted society and held it, a restless, but conquered
province. John's father marked with joy his son's sudden regularity in
Sunday-school. If his wife was less pleased it was because to her all
punctuality was a personal affront; it was some time before she
discovered the cause to be Miss Fannie Halliday. By that time half the
young men in town were in love with Fannie, and three-fourths of them in
abject fear of her wit; yet, in true Southern fashion, casting
themselves in its way with Hindoo abandon.

H