She was half conscious that she was appealing to the memorials around her to strengthen her in her purpose not to yield, not to make peace with the son of the man who had slain her husband, her hero, her love; she felt that in harboring for an instant such an impulse she was untrue to the Cause which, though lost, was for her forever living with the deathless devotion of love and anguish. "These relics do move me," her son-in-law said gently. "They move me so deeply that they seem to me wrong. I confess that I was thinking, before you came in, that if I were a Southerner, with the traditions of the South behind me, and the bitter sense of failure to embitter me, they would stir me to madness; that I should feel it impossible ever to be loyal to anything but the South. The war is over. The South at last is understood. She is honored for the incredible bravery with which, under crushing odds, she fought for her conviction. Why prolong the inevitable pain? Why gather these relics to nourish a feeling absolutely untrue--the feeling that the Union is less your country than it is ours?" "Because it is just to the dead," she answered swiftly. "Because it is only justice that we keep in remembrance how true they were, how gallant, how brave, how noble, and--O God!--that we make some poor record of what we of the South have suffered!" He shook his head and sighed. She saw the tears in his eyes and did not attempt to hide her own. "Would you have it forgotten," she demanded passionately, "that the grandfather of your son--the father of your wife--was one of God's noblemen? Would you have him remembered only as a beaten rebel? I tell you that if we had not gathered these memorials, every clod that was wet with their blood would cry out against us! In the North you call these men rebels; there is no battlefield in the South where the very rustle of the grass does not whisper over their graves that they were patriots and heroes! And this, poor though it be"--and she waved her hand to the cases around them--"is the best memorial we can give them." He made a step forward, and held out both his hands impulsively. She did not take them, and they dropped again. He hesitated, and then drew back.