"Private enterprise!" cried Garnet. "His jackals will run him for Congress." And they did--against Garnet. The times were seething. Halliday, viewing matters impartially in the clear, calm light of petroleum torches, justified Congress in acts which Garnet termed "the spume of an insane revenge;" while Garnet, with equal calmness of judgment, under other petroleum torches, gloried in the "masterly inactivity" of Dixie's whitest and best--which Launcelot denounced as a foolish and wicked political strike. All the corruptions bred by both sides in a gigantic war--and before it in all the crudeness of the country's first century--were pouring down and spouting up upon Dixie their rain of pitch and ashes. Negroes swarmed about the polls, elbowed their masters, and challenged their votes. Ragged negresses talked loudly along the sidewalk of one another as "ladies," and of their mistresses as "women." White men of fortune and station were masking, night-riding, whipping and killing; and blue cavalry rattled again through the rocky streets of Suez. Such was life when dashing Fannie 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.