Rosehill, the home she lived in, had more and finer magnolias than it had roses, but a great many and very beautiful roses grew at Rosehill. And in August you could smell the musk and the heliotrope right across the Potomac. The exterior of the old red-brick “mansion” was beautiful only because so many had loved it, because birth, bridal and death so often had hallowed it, and because so many beautiful things grew about it, some of them nailed up on its mellowed red walls, some climbing there needing no nailing, for their young tendrils loved every tiny chink that time had furrowed in those old bricks. Rosehill was on the river-edge of Virginia, only a pleasant jaunt from Washington, but it _was_ Virginia. In the core of the old virgin state itself the Civil War had ruined or wrenched from them every holding the Townsends ever had had. But Rosehill remained to the Southern general’s widow, and here she had come with the two children the war had left her, and lived in it bitterly enough to the hour of her death, but had kept her Virginian state as far as she could with an altered purse in an altered country, and modifying in nothing her Virginian ways or manner of life. And here Julia Townsend had grown up and lived serenely enough, for she had been in her cradle when Lee faced Appomattox, and she remembered no other home. She inherited and kept all her mother’s prejudices, but little of her mother’s bitterness. She even pitied all Northerners more than she disliked them. She never by any chance broke Northern bread, but now and then she permitted some distinguished few of them to break her bread—a little “below the salt,” but graciously. But no denizen of the White House could win through her gates, and she’d have eaten crusts in a thieves’ kitchen, or, if it comes to that, brimstone in a place and company she was too refined ever to mention, far more willingly and with far less sense of degradation, than she would have eaten or drunk at the White House, or soiled the sole of her shoe on its carpets.