Miss Townsend was “At Home”—and so were the roses, the strawberries, all the delicate eggshell china and the old heavy silver. She was giving her annual garden-party. And that she might entertain her guests delicately and amply—as a Southern woman should—it had been shortened commons at Rosehill for many a week. Not the servants—they had fared as they always did, and so had the beggars who had gone to the kitchen door—but the mistress of Rosehill had discontinued the late-dinner meal—which she called “supper,” and which she liked—and had gone to bed each night at dusk, and had refrained from lighting a candle when sleep would not come. That had been a veritable sacrifice on the function-altar of hospitality. Next to drinking buttermilk the thing that Miss Julia most enjoyed was reading novels in bed—by the soft, clear light of four or five wax candles. And she, complete hostess that, true to her blood, she was, had imposed on herself other personal curtailments and economies that cost her less but saved her purse more. She had not gone to a concert or seen a play during her “retreat” of economy. But, as it chanced, there had been no play that she much wished to see at a Washington theater just then. She was an inveterate theater-goer and she rarely denied herself a matinée that called her. She always went alone, but she always sat in the best seats, and Uncle Lysander, his dear black face shining with importance and his great splay hands encased in snow-white gloves, always waited outside to escort his mistress home, whether the matinée ended in the dusk and dark of winter or in the clear light of summer—if so side-by-side a word as “escort” can be used of his attendance close behind Miss Julia. And a “good” concert she missed very rarely indeed. Miss Julia did not care for classical music, but she liked to think that she did, and she and her best bonnet, and her rose-point-lace collar, fastened carefully (not to injure the priceless mesh) by a gold and cameo breast-pin that had belonged to Martha Washington, were as sure to enrich the parquet seats as Brahms or Grieg or Haydn or Liszt were to appear in the program. In winter she wore gray or dun-colored velvet (first made in Paris for a Mrs. Townsend before Robert Edward Lee was born); in summer thin-textured silver or lilac silk. In winter she wore a costly Cashmere shawl, in summer one of heavily embroidered white Canton silk. The Cashmere shawl had a skimp, narrow, parti-colored fringe; the Chinese one had a sumptuous, knotted fringe of its own time-deepened ivory silk. But she always wore the gold and cameo breast-pin and the deep collar of rose-point; she always wore gloves of delicate kid, made by a famous French manufacturer, and exactly matching her gowns; in winter her black velvet bonnet (always the same bonnet) nodded an ostrich feather that matched her gown of the occasion as perfectly as did her gloves; in summer, her bonnet of white chip paid the hue of her dress the same