Philip, abashed by the implication conveyed in this, relapsed into silence. Libby Prison and Andersonville were still frightful realities in the New England mind, and the remembrance of them extinguished the fact that there had been war prisons in the North, as well. “War is a pretty dreadful thing,” he conceded; adding: “My father was wounded at Antietam.” “Let’s not begin to talk about the war; we’ll be quarrelling in another minute or two if we do.” “I don’t admit that,” Philip contended amicably. “As I said a little while ago, the war is over--it’s been over for fifteen years. But let it go and tell me about Mississippi. I’ve never been farther south than we are just now.” “Dear old Mississippi!” she said softly. And after that the talk became a gentle monologue for the greater part, in which Philip heard the story duplicated so often south of Mason and Dixon’s line; of the hardships of the war, and the greater hardships of its aftermath; of ill health and property loss; of hope deferred and almost extinguished in the case of the invalid father; of the final family council in which it had been determined to try the healing effect of the high and dry altitudes. Philip listened and was moved, not only by sympathy, which--again in strict accordance with his blood and breeding--he was careful not to express, but also by a vast wonder. No young woman of his limited acquaintance in the homeland could ever have been induced to talk so frankly and freely to a comparative stranger. Yet there was also a proud reserve just behind the frankness, and after a time he came to understand that it was pride of birth. The Dabneys, as he gathered, were an ancient family, descended from the Huguenot D’Aubignys, and originally Virginians. As a Trask and a son of more or less hardy New England stock, family traditions meant little to him. But he was beginning to see that they meant very much indeed to the soft-speaking young woman beside him. “It is evident that you believe in blue blood,” he ventured to say, after the Dabney lineage had been fairly traced for him. Then he added: “We don’t think so very much of that in New England.” “Oh, I don’t see how you can help it,” was the astonished exclamation. “Don’t you believe in heredity?” “Yes, I suppose I do, in a way,” he qualified. “We can’t expect to gather figs from thistles. Still, it is a long step from that admission to a belief in--well, in anything like an aristocracy of the blood.” “You think there is no such thing as gentle blood?” “Not in the sense that one person is intrinsically better than another. Unless all history is at fault, the ‘gentle blood’ you speak of is just as likely to go hideously wrong as any other.” “I don’t agree with you at all,” was the prompt retort.