Then would come the dear major. He loved his eldest daughter as he loved nothing else in the world, and he was a just man at heart. He could not meet her arguments--yes, she was right, she was right. But then he would go away, and the waves of scandal and shame would come rolling. “My child,” he pleaded, “have you thought what this thing is doing to your husband? Do you realise that while you talk about protecting other people, you are putting upon Douglas a brand that will follow him through life?” Uncle Mandeville came up from New Orleans to see his favourite niece; and the wave smote him as he alighted from the train, and he became so much excited that he went to the club and got drunk, and then could not see his niece, but had to be carried off upstairs and given forcible hypodermics. Cousin Clive told Sylvia about it afterwards--how Uncle Mandeville refused to believe the truth, and swore that he would shoot some of these fellows if they didn’t stop talking about his niece. Said Clive, with a grim laugh: “I told him: ‘If Sylvia had her way, you’d shoot a good part of the men in the town.’” He answered: “Well, by God, I’ll do it--it would serve the scoundrels right!” And he tried to get out of bed and get his pants and his pistols--so that in the end it was necessary to telephone for the major, and then for Barry Chilton and two of his gigantic sons from their plantation. Sylvia had her way, and talked things out with the agonised Celeste. And the next day came Aunt Varina, hardly able to contain herself. “Oh, Sylvia, such a horrible thing! To hear such words coming from your little sister’s lips--like the toads and snakes in the fairy story! To think of these ideas festering in a young girl’s brain!” And then again: “Sylvia, your sister declares she will never go to a party again! You are teaching her to hate men! You will make her a STRONG-MINDED woman!”--that was another phrase they had summing up a whole universe of horrors. Sylvia could not recall a time when she had not heard that warning. “Be careful, dear, when you express an opinion, always end it with a question: ‘Don’t you think so?’ or something like that, otherwise, men may get the idea that you are ‘STRONG-MINDED’!” Sylvia, in her girlhood, had heard vague hints and rumours which now she was able to interpret in the light of her experience. In her courtship days she had met a man who always wore gloves, even in the hottest weather, and she had heard that this was because of some affliction of the skin. Now, talking with the young matrons of her own set, she learned that this man had married, and had since had to take to a wheel-chair, while his wife had borne a child with a monstrous deformed head, and had died of the ordeal and the shock.