Charlotte Thrift had passed eighteen when the Civil War began. There is a really beautiful picture of her in her riding habit, taken at the time. She is wearing a hard-boiled hat with a plume, and you wonder how she ever managed to reconcile that skirt with a horse's back. The picture doesn't show the color of the plume but you doubtless would know. It is a dashing plume anyway, and caresses her shoulder. In one hand she is catching up the folds of her voluminous skirt, oh, ever so little; and in the other, carelessly, she is holding a rose. Her young face is so serious as to be almost severe. That is, perhaps, due to her eyebrows which were considered too heavy and dark for feminine beauty. And yet there is a radiance about the face, and an effect of life and motion about the young figure that bespeaks but one thing. Great-aunt Charlotte still has the picture somewhere. Sometimes, in a mild orgy of "straightening up" she comes upon it in its pasteboard box tucked away at the bottom of an old chest in her bedroom. At such times she is likely to take it out and look at it with a curiously detached air, as though it were the picture of a stranger. It is in this wise, too, that her dim old eyes regard the world--impersonally. It is as though, at seventy-four, she no longer is swayed by emotions, memories, people, events. Remote, inaccessible, immune, she sees, weighs, and judges with the detached directness of a grim old idol. Fifty-five years had yellowed the photograph of the wasp-waisted girl in the billowing riding skirt when her grand-niece, Charley Kemp, appeared before her in twentieth century riding clothes: sleeveless jacket ending a little below the hips; breeches baggy in the seat but gripping the knees. Great-aunt Charlotte had said, "So that's what it's come to." You could almost hear her agile old mind clicking back to that other young thing of the plume, and the rose and the little booted foot peeping so demurely from beneath the folds of the sweeping skirt. "Don't you like it?" Charley had looked down at her slim self and had flicked her glittering tan boots with her riding whip because that seemed the thing to do. Charley went to matinees. Great-aunt Charlotte had pursed her crumpled old lips, whether in amusement or disapproval--those withered lips whose muscles had long ago lost their elasticity. "Well, it's kind of comical, really. And ugly. But you don't look ugly in it, Charley, or comical either. You look like a right pretty young boy." Her eyes had a tenderly amused glint. Those eyes saw less now than they used to: an encroaching cataract. But they had a bright and piercing appearance owing to the heavy brows which, by some prank of nature, had defied the aging process that had laid its blight upon hair, cheek, lips, skin, and frame. The brows had remained jetty black; twin cornices of defiance in the ivory ruin of her face. They gave her a misleadingly sinister and cynical look. Piratical, almost.