Know, all women and clergymen, of this and more or less future generations, that the story I am telling has very narrow limitations, as well in time as in space. It is of Virginia[1] alone that I am writing. Of Virginia _not_ in the fourth quarter, but Virginia in the beginning of the second half of the nineteenth century. Strolling through this narrow field, at this particular harvest-time, I have selected three sheaves wherewith to fashion such rural picture as my hand should have cunning to form. Lucy, I chose, originally, as symbolizing the purity and simplicity of the womanhood of our old Virginia life. But of her I am conscious that I have given the merest outline; and I find that I cannot fill in the picture adequately, and at the same time maintain the rigidly monographic type of my work. Let her stand, therefore, just outside of our central group (where the full light falls), illumining the half-shadow with her gentle, St. Cecilia look. Is that a smile that lights her eye, or is it the glancing of a tear? Our Alice illustrates for us, as I have said elsewhere, the careless freedom of those old days, and shows how our democratic-aristocratic Virginia girls could be gay without being indiscreet, joyous yet not loud, unconventional yet full of real dignity; how, in the hundreds of years that separate them from the mother-country, they have shaken off English stiffness, while clinging fast to English love of liberty. But she is fully capable of speaking for herself; and we pass on to Mary Rolfe. The reader has already, I hope, a tolerably clear conception of this young person. Stature below the average, eyes full of soul, a manner painfully shy with strangers, childlike and confiding with intimates; a mind admirably stored, considering her years, with all that can adorn; often silent, and preferring to hear rather than to be heard, but murmuring, when, forgetting her reserve, she does speak, like a brook, and in a voice of such surpassing sweetness that one could have wished that, like the brook, she would go on forever. Eloquent rather than witty. And I fear few would have called her wise. For the rest, full of high imaginings, and a born hero-worshipper.