All these things are only incidents illustrative of that heroism on the part of women which the poet, if we had a poet, would seize upon as the vital and essential story of the Confederate war. If that heroism could be properly celebrated, it would make a literature worthy to stand shoulder to shoulder with the hero-songs of old Homer himself. But that story of woman’s love and woman’s sacrifice has never been told and never will be, for the reason that there is none worthy to tell it among those of us who survive of those who saw it and knew the self-sacrificing absoluteness of its heroism. Into all this work of mercy Evelyn Byrd entered not only with enthusiasm, but with the tireless energy of healthy youth and with a queer sagacity—born, perhaps, of her strange life-experience—which enabled her sometimes to double or quadruple the beneficent effects of her work by the deftness of its doing. Her enthusiasm in the cause rather astonished Dorothy, at first. If the girl had been brought up in Virginia, if her home had always been there, if she had had a people of her own there, with a father and a brother in the trenches, her devotion would have been natural enough. But none of those reasons for her enthusiasm existed. She had probably been born in Virginia, or at least of Virginian parentage, though even that assumption rested upon no better foundation than the fact that she bore a historic Virginian name. She had lived elsewhere during her childhood and youth. She had come into the Southern country under compulsion, and three fourths of the war was over before she came. So far as she knew, she had no relatives in Virginia, and very certainly she had none there whom she knew and loved. Yet she was passionate almost to madness in her Virginianism, and she was self-sacrificing even beyond the standards of the other heroic women around her. That she should enter passionately into any cause into which she enters at all [wrote Dorothy to Arthur during one of his absences at the front] is altogether natural. Her nature is passionate in an extreme degree, and, good as her judgment is when it is cool, she sends it about its business whenever it assumes to meddle with her passionate impulses. She has certain well-fixed principles of conduct, from which she never departs by so much as a hair’s breadth—chiefly, I imagine, because they are principles which she has wrought out in her mind without anybody’s teaching or anybody’s suggestion. They are the final results of her own thinking. She regards them as ultimates of truth. But subject to these, she is altogether a creature of impulse. Even to save one she loves from great calamity, she would not think of compromising the most trivial of her fundamental principles; yet for the sake of one she loves, she would sacrifice herself illimitably even upon the most trivial occasion. It is a dangerous character to possess, but a most interesting one to study, and certainly it is admirable.