It was just a week after these festivities that there occurred the death of Sylvia’s great-aunt. Nothing could have been more characteristic than the method of her departure. She left home and betook herself to an aristocratic boarding-house, kept by a “decayed gentlewoman” in New Orleans; she might be a long time a-dying, she said, and did not want anybody making a fuss over her. Also she did not care to have her nieces and nephews calling in to drop hints as to the disposition of her rosewood bedroom set, her miniature piano and her Queen Anne baby’s crib. She left a will in which she bequeathed her property to her grand-niece, Sylvia Castleman, to be held in trust for her until she was forty years of age. “Some man will take care of her while she is beautiful,” she wrote, “but later on she may find use for my pittance.” And finally the old lady put in a clause to the effect that the bequest was conditional upon her grand-niece’s obeying her injunction to wear no mourning for her. “It is impossible to make a woman with brown eyes look presentable in black,” she wrote. And this, you understand, in a document which had to be filed for probate! Most fortunate it was that all the editors of newspapers in the South are gentlemen, who can be relied upon not to print the news. Sylvia obeyed the instructions of this extraordinary document, and felt it a solemn duty to go to entertainments, even with tears in her eyes. So now began a bewildering succession of dinners, dances and receptions, balls and suppers, house parties, hunting parties, auto parties, theatre parties. It speaks marvels for her constitution that she was able to stand the strain. When the last light had been extinguished she would drag herself upstairs to bed, a limp train hung over her limp arm, her feet aching in the tiny slippers and her back aching in the cruel stays. The Governor saw fit to appoint her as his “sponsor” at the state militia encampment; and so for ten days she would rise every morning at daybreak, ride out with an “escort” to witness guard-mount, and remain in the midst of a rush of gaieties until three or four o’clock the next morning, when the nightly dance came to an end. Sylvia always refused to give photographs of herself to men. It was part of her feeling about them that she could not endure the thought of her image being in their rooms. But her enterprising Aunt Nannie, the Bishop’s wife, presented one to the editor of a metropolitan magazine, where it appeared under the heading of “A Reigning Beauty of the New South.” It was taken up and reproduced in Southern papers, and after that Sylvia found that her fame had preceded her—everywhere she went new worshippers joined her train, and came to her hometown to lay siege to her.