“Get out, Mamie! You’re making a point about nothing,” her cousin answered, in an amiable, off-hand fashion. “If you’d been the heroine of that incident, you’d think you deserved cheers and you’d have had them. I’m not going to see Miss Ayr of Virginia deprived of the honor and glory which are her due.” His cousin said nothing, but her face continued to look both offended and aggrieved, and she turned away to speak with some of the women of the party, who seemed promptly sympathetic. Carter heard her name pronounced several times among them in a tone which she did not like, and it was Gladys whom she distinctly heard saying: “This is what comes of giving a girl a man’s name and letting her run wild, as they do in the South.” Carter felt indignant at the aspersion cast on her beloved South, but the assiduities which she was at that moment receiving from all the men in the party helped her to bear it. It was not altogether her victoriousness in her recent undertaking that had made them rally round her so. It had at last penetrated their rather slow minds that the women were exercising a sort of tacit ostracism against this young stranger, and every one of them was ready with his protest. Carter, moreover, had acquired a brilliant color, by reason of her late experience, and, now that their eyes had been drawn to her directly, they saw how uncommonly pretty she was, and regarded her unfashionable garments with a commiseration that had something akin to chivalry in it. She felt this, and, under the influence of sympathy, her beauty blossomed out like a flower. She became suddenly gay and at her ease. The men were so absolutely friendly that the women no longer frightened her. When Jim Stafford had brought his four bays triumphantly into place and they had taken their position by the race-course, the grooms took the horses away, and the host of the party being liberated from his exacting duties as whip, was free to seek his own will and pleasure. It was not long before the nature and direction of that became manifest, for he deliberately proposed a shuffling of seats and partners, by which he managed to seat himself next to Carter. “I want to understand the philosophy of that splendid achievement of yours,” he said. “Why did the mud make the ox jump up so quickly?” “Because the mud stopped its nostrils and it could not breathe.” “But can’t oxen breathe through their mouths?” “They either can’t, or they think they can’t, for they never make any effort to do it. It was having its breathing suddenly checked that so startled and terrified the creature that it instinctively sprang to its feet, and its whole mood was changed.” “And where--if one may ask--did you become the possessor of such a unique and valuable piece of information?” (By Jove, she _was_ pretty, he reflected, and particularly so at that moment, when, for some reason, a flood of lovely rose-color suffused her face.)