Pascagoula and the gulf towns boast themselves, quite properly, as warm weather resorts. Jane, coming from a northern city, had never quite understood how Southerners could go further south for the summer; but the immediate sight of this resort in winter convinced her. Pascagoula in December was kin to Coney Island in March--a background built of flimsy, emptied by the chill; a tenantless shell, whose pleasure-seekers hibernated elsewhere, to more substantial shelter. It had its own incongruous charm for lovers, who never mourn at isolation. There was a thoughtful delight in tempting the shaky remnants of wharves, broken and scattered by the whip-lash of the last equinoctial storms, and as yet not rebuilt. They visited by launch the breakwater islands, Horn Island with its fishing colony, Deer Island's populous turtle farms, and the lighthouses and dismantled fort upon the sandy spit called Ship Island. Here they walked a beach littered with curled conchs, horseshoe crab shells, and debris from the deeper waters washed up for a glassy-eyed view at the hitherto unseen sun. By electric line they touched at Beauvoir for an afternoon--Beauvoir, as surely of the Old South as the decaying mansions at Jackson; a great-pillared white house back in a grove of giant leafless oaks. Its ample spaces and huge hand-hewn beams belonged less to the faded Confederate soldiers and their wives tenanting it than to its memories of Jefferson Davis, that passionate advocate of slavery, whose name is enshrined beside the warrior leaders of the buried cause. "We can enjoy the firm beauty of the place--it is so alien, so remote," Jane meditated, as, her arm upon his shoulder, she turned Pelham for a last view at the mausoleum of gray hopes. "Like the Punic war; or the time-blotted conquests of the Incas, before the Spaniards came." "Yes; their cause, with their time, has grown unreal. Slavery is almost prehistoric, with the modern battles upon us. Old Grandfather Judson knew Jeff Davis, and visited here.... Thank God the South didn't win!" "Slavery would have died its natural death anyway." "But union was worth while.... Isn't it, dearest?" She pressed his arm appreciatively. They spent the rest of the week in New Orleans. During these days his untried fantasies changed to reality, with the gradual knowledge of this lithe, lovely girl beside him, who had, by some freak of good fortune, given herself to him ... taken him for her mate. It was hard to avoid the rut of old phrasings of the ever-new relationship.