"You have noticed it yourself?" asked Colonel Yancey, eagerly. "You must remember that I have not been south of Washington for thirty years." "Ah, yes, I remember. You had the luck to be in the Civil War." "I was in it only the last two years before the surrender. I enlisted when I was fourteen, was a captain at sixteen, and was wounded in my last engagement." "And you’ve never been back since?" "Never!" Colonel Yancey leaned back and sighed. "Never go, then!" he said. "Take my advice and never go. Remember your beautiful unspoiled South as you see her in your dreams!" "The South is like a petted woman who openly declares that she would rather be lied to agreeably than be told the truth to, objectionably," said Captain Lee, with a regretful smile. Then he added, with a mischievous glance at Carolina, "Do the ladies still--er--gossip, Colonel Yancey?" The colonel simply flung up his hands. "Gossip? My God!" It was Carolina who rebuked him. Her voice was grave, but her eyes flashed fire. "Do Southern ladies gossip more than Parisian or London ladies?" "Fairly hit, colonel!" said Captain Lee. "To answer that truthfully, you must admit that they do not, for nothing can equal the malice of Paris and London drawing-rooms." "Quite right, captain. No, missy," he answered, "it is only because we expect so much more of Southern ladies that their gossip sounds more malicious by way of contrast." Carolina smiled, well pleased by the brilliant tact with which he always extricated himself from a dilemma. When Colonel Yancey had gone, Captain Lee put one arm around Carolina’s shoulder, and with the other hand tilted the girl’s flowerlike face up to his, with a remark which, if he had made it to his son, would have changed the whole current of the girl’s life. He said: "Ah, little daughter, the colonel is like all the rest of the Southerners. He can see the truth and can spout gloriously about her, but in a money transaction between himself and a Northern man, he would forget it all, and would consider it no more than honest to ’skin the damned Yankee,’ to quote his own language." And with that the subject was dropped. The Lee household at that time consisted of Captain and Mrs. Lee, the two children, Sherman and Carolina, and the widow of a cousin of Captain Lee, Rhett Winchester, whom they called Cousin Lois. Mrs. Winchester had abundant means of her own, which were all in the hands of the Lee family agents, and she was distinguished by her idolatry of Carolina. No temptation of travel, no wooing of elderly fortune hunters, had power to move her. All the love which in her early life had been given to her husband, relations, and friends, she now poured out on the child of her husband’s cousin. She had been denied children of her own, which, perhaps, was just as well, as she would have ruined them with indulgence. Mrs. Winchester was a born aunt or grandmother. She took up the spoiling just where a mother’s firmness ceased.