"Believes what, sir?" gasped the great man, enraged. "Believes that outlandish Yankee twaddle about a woman wanting any rights except the right to a husband! Do you think she'd be running round loose in this crackbrained way if she had a home she could stay in and a husband she could slave over? I tell you there's not a woman alive that ain't happier with a bad husband than with none at all." "That's a comfortable view, at any rate." "View? It's not a view, it's a fact--and what business has a lady got with a view anyway? If Miss Matoaca hadn't got hold of those heathenish views, she'd be a happy wife and mother this very minute." "Does it follow, General, that she would have been a happy one?" I asked a little unfairly. "Of course it follows. Isn't every wife and mother happy? What more does she want unless she's a Yankee Abolitionist?" "Who's a Yankee?" enquired young George, in his amiable voice from the hall. "I'm surprised to hear you calling names when the war is over, sir." "I wasn't calling names, George. I was just saying that Miss Matoaca Bland was a Yankee. Did you ever hear of a Virginia lady who wasn't content to be what the Lord and the men intended her?" "No, sir, I never did--but it seems to me that Miss Matoaca has managed to secure a greater share of your attention than the more amenable Virginia ladies." "Well, isn't it a sad enough sight to see any lady going cracked?" retorted the General, hotly; "do you know, George, that Sally Mickleborough--he says he's sure it's Sally Mickleborough--has promised to marry Ben Starr?" "Oh, it's Sally all right," responded George, "she has just told me." He came over and held out his hand, smiling pleasantly, though there was a hurt look in his eyes. "I congratulate you, Ben," he observed in his easy, good-natured way, "the best man comes in ahead." His face wore the frown, not from temper, but from pain, that I had seen on it at the club when his favourite hunter had dropped dead, and he had tried to appear indifferent. He was a superb horseman, a typical man about town, a bit of a sport, also, as Dr. Theophilus said. I knew he loved Sally, just as I had known he loved his hunter, by a sympathetic reading of his character rather than by any expression of regret on his long, highly coloured, slightly wooden countenance, with its set mouth over which drooped a mustache so carefully trimmed that it looked almost as if it were glued on his upper lip. "By the way, uncle, have you heard the last news?" he asked, "Barclay is buying all the A. P. & C. Stock he can lay hands on. It's selling at--" "Hello! What's that? Barclay, did you say? I knew it was coming, and that he'd spring it. Here, Hatty, give me my cape, I'm going back to the office!" "George, George, the doctor told you not to excite yourself," remonstrated Miss Hatty, appearing in the doorway with a glass of medicine in her hand.