Carolina’s little ears burned so scarlet that she got up and took Peachie and Flower out into the garden, and, as the three girls went down the steps, a perfect babel of voices arose in the parlour. Plainly Carolina’s going had loosened their tongues. They drew their chairs around Mrs. Winchester’s, and, although the day was cool, they gave her the warmest half-hour she could remember since she left Bombay. They could understand and excuse every feminine vagary, from stealing another woman’s lover to coaxing a man to spend more than he could afford, or idling away every moment of a day over novels or embroidery, but for a beauty, a belle, a toast, a girl who had been presented at three courts before she was twenty, to come down to South Carolina and live on horseback or in a buggy, meeting men by appointment and understanding long columns of figures, sending and receiving cipher telegrams, and in all this aided and abetted by no less exclusive and particular a chaperon than Cousin Lois Winchester, Rhett Winchester’s widow, herself related to the Lees,--this was a little more than they could comprehend. Nor could Miss Sue Yancey nor Miss Sallie (Mrs. Pringle), although they were in the same house with her, throw any light on the subject or help them in any way. Carolina was plainly a puzzle to the La Granges, at least, and when, that same afternoon, Carolina and the two girls in the garden saw another carryall and a buggy drive in at Whitehall, containing her father’s relatives, the Lees, she frankly said that she would stay out a little longer and give them a chance to talk her over before she went in to meet them. Peachie laughed at Carolina’s high colour when she said this. "You mustn’t get mad, Cousin Carol, because you are talked about. We talk about everybody,--it’s all we have to do in the country. But you ought to be used to it. You are such a little beauty, you must have been talked about all your life." "Nonsense, Peachie!" cried Carolina, blushing. "I am not half as good-looking as you and Flower. But the way you all watch me here makes me feel as if I were a strange kind of a beetle under a powerful microscope, at the other end of which there was always a curious human eye." "Oh, Cousin Carol, you do say such quayah things!" cried Peachie, laughing. "We ought to go in, I think," said Carolina. But at her words the two girls, as if nerving themselves for an ordeal planned beforehand, looked at each other, and then Peachie, in evident embarrassment, said: "Cousin Carol, I want to ask you something, and I don’t want you to be offended or to think that we have no manners, but--" "Go on, Peachie, dear. Ask anything you like. You won’t offend me. Remember that we are all cousins down here." "I know, you dear! But maybe when you know what I want,--but you see, we never get a chance to see any of the styles--"