in the state and they were small. They existed chiefly for the purpose of transacting business for the more highly placed and more highly cultivated planters. The people of the cities, with exceptions that only emphasized the general truth, were inferior to the dwellers on the plantations, in point of education, culture and social position. It had always been so in Virginia. From the days of William Byrd of Westover to those of Washington, and Jefferson and Madison and John Marshall, and from their time to the middle of the nineteenth century, it had been the choice of all cultivated Virginians to live upon their plantations. Thence had always come the scholars, the statesmen, the great lawyers and the masterful political writers who had conferred untold lustre upon the state.
Washington’s career as military chieftain and statesman, had been one long sacrifice of his desire to lead the planter life at Mount Vernon. Jefferson’s heart was at Monticello while he penned the Declaration of Independence, and it was the proud boast of Madison that he like Jefferson, quitted public office poorer than he was when he undertook such service to his native land, and rejoiced in his return to the planter life of his choice at Montpélièr.
In brief, the entire history of the state and all its traditions, all its institutions, all its habits of thought tended to commend the country life to men of refined mind, and to make of the plantation owners and their families a distinctly recognized aristocracy, not only of social prestige but even more of education, refinement and intellectual leadership.
To Arthur Brent had come the opportunity to make himself at once and without effort, a conspicuous member of this blue blooded caste. His plantation had come to him, not by vulgar purchase, but by inheritance. It had been the home of his ancestors, the possession and seat of his family for more than two hundred years. And his family had been from the first one of distinction and high influence. One of his great, great, great grandfathers, had been a member of the Jamestown settlement and a soldier under John Smith. His great, great grandfather had shared the honor of royal proscription as an active participant in Bacon’s rebellion. His great grandfather had been the companion of young George Washington in his perilous expeditions to “the Ohio country,” and had fallen by Washington’s side in Braddock’s blundering campaign. His grandfather had been a drummer boy at Yorktown, had later become one of the great jurists of the state and had been a distinguished soldier in the war of 1812. His father, as we know, had strayed away to the west, as so many Virginians of his time did, but he had won honors there which made Virginia proud of him. And fortunately for Arthur Brent, that father’s removal to the west was not made until this his son had been born at the old family seat.
“For,” explained Aunt Polly to the young man, in her own confident way, “in spite of your travels, you are a native Virginian, Arthur, and when you have dropped into the ways of the country, people will overlook the fact that you have lived so much at the north, and even in Europe.”
“But why, Aunt Polly,” asked Arthur, “should that fact be deemed something to be ‘overlooked?’ Surely travel broadens one’s views and – ”
“Oh, yes, of course, in the case of people not born in Virginia. But a Virginian doesn’t need it, and it upsets his ideas. You see when a Virginian travels he forgets what is best. He actually grows like other people. You yourself show the ill effects of it in a hundred ways. Of course you haven’t quite lost your character as a Virginian, and you’ll gradually come back to it here at Wyanoke; but ‘evil communications corrupt good manners,’ and I can’t help seeing it in you – at least in your speech. You don’t pronounce your words correctly. You say ‘cart’ ‘carpet’ and ‘garden’ instead of ‘cyart’ ‘cyarpet’ and ‘gyarden.’ And you flatten your a’s dreadfully. You say ‘grass’ instead of ‘grawss’ and ‘basket’ instead of ‘bawsket’ and all that sort of thing. And you roll your r’s dreadfully. It gives me a chill whenever I hear you say ‘master’ instead of ‘mahstah.’ But you’ll soon get over that, and in the meantime, as you were born in Virginia and are the head of an old Virginia family, the gentlemen and ladies who are coming every day to welcome you, are very kind about it. They overlook it, as your misfortune, rather than your fault.”
“That is certainly very kind of them, Aunt Polly. I can’t imagine anything more generous in the mind than that. But – well, never mind.”
“What were you going to say, Arthur?”
“Oh, nothing of any consequence. I was only thinking that perhaps my Virginia neighbors do not lay so much stress upon these things as you do.”
“Of course not. That is one of the troubles of this time. Since we let the Yankees build railroads through Virginia, everybody here wants to travel. Why, half the gentlemen in this county have been to New York!”
“How very shocking!” said Arthur, hiding his smile behind his hand.
“That’s really what made the trouble for poor Dorothy,” mused Aunt Polly. “If her father hadn’t gone gadding about – he even went to Europe you know – Dorothy never would have been born.”
“How fortunate that would have been! But tell me about it, Aunt Polly. You see I don’t quite understand in what way it would have been better for Dorothy not to have been born – unless we accept the pessimist philosophy, and consider all human life a curse.”
“Now you know, I don’t understand that sort of talk, Arthur,” answered Aunt Polly. “I never studied philosophy or chemistry, and I’m glad of it. But I know it would have been better for Dorothy if Dr. South had stayed at home like a reasonable man, and married – but there, I mustn’t talk of that. Dorothy is a dear girl, and I’m fitting her for her position in life as well as I can. If I could stop her from thinking, now, or – ”
“Pray don’t, Aunt Polly! Her thinking interests me more than anything I ever studied, – except perhaps the strange and even inexplicable therapeutic effect of champagne in yellow fever – ”
“There you go again, with your outlandish words, which you know I don’t understand or want to understand, though sometimes I remember them.”
“Tell me of an instance, Aunt Polly.”
“Why, you said to me the other night that Dorothy was a ‘psychological enigma’ to your mind, and that you very much wished you might know ‘the conditions of heredity and environment’ that had produced ‘so strange a phenomenon.’ There! I remember your words, though I haven’t the slightest notion what they mean. I went upstairs and wrote them down. Of course I couldn’t spell them except in my own way – and that would make you laugh I reckon if you could see it, which you never shall – but I haven’t a glimmering notion of what the words mean. Now I want to tell you about Dorothy.”
“Good! I am anxious to hear!”
“Oh, I’m not going to tell you what you want to hear. That would be gossip, and no Virginia woman ever gossips.”
That was true. The Virginians of that time, men and women alike, locked their lips and held their tongues in leash whenever the temptation came to them to discuss the personal affairs of their neighbors. They were bravely free and frank of speech when telling men to their faces what opinions they might hold concerning them; but they did that only when necessity, or honor, or the vindication of truth compelled. They never made the character or conduct or affairs of each other a subject of conversation. It was the very crux of honor to avoid that.
“Then tell me what you are minded to reveal, Aunt Polly,” responded Arthur. “I do not care to know anything else.”
“Well, Dorothy is in a peculiar position – not by her own fault. She must marry into a good family, and it has fallen to me to prepare her for her fate.”
“Surely,
