Mrs. Charteris took this slur upon her sex with perfect calmness. She saw that, despite Isabey’s outward composure, he was shaken to the center of his soul. He was the most courteous of men, and his attitude toward women was one of delicate compliment, and these last unguarded words which had escaped from him, and that, too, in the presence of a woman, were significant. Isabey walked up and down the room. Mrs. Charteris remained standing, with one hand on the back of her chair, and, picking up a fan, fanned herself with some agitation. Isabey, after a few turns up and down the room, came back and scrutinized her as closely as she had examined him a few moments before. “I think,” said Isabey, coolly changing the subject, “that the psychology of this war time is profoundly interesting. Not only everything is changed, but everybody. Two years ago you Virginia people were the quietest provincials that ever lived. I know you well. I have visited in Virginia, and I have seen hundreds of you at your baths and springs, and all of you are alike in some respects. I, who know the great round world well, was always impressed by these Virginia people as having been drugged. You didn’t seem to realize that the world was closing in round you, around the whole South, for that matter, and that some day a convulsion must come. I myself own three hundred negroes. My father owned nearly a thousand, but I have been preparing for a change ever since I grew a mustache. I have not gone on investing in land and negroes quite unconscious that any other values existed. If the North should succeed and the negroes should be free, I should not be penniless, but for most of the people of the South all values would be destroyed.” Mrs. Charteris suspected that this digression was really meant by Isabey to lead away from the subject of Angela, which apparently was of such acute interest to him. But she answered promptly enough and according to her lights: “You are not one of these crazy abolitionists, I hope. What would we do with the negroes if we freed them? Look at my place. I have a hundred of them here, happy, well-fed, well cared for, nursed in illness, provided for in old age, decently buried when they are dead. Every Sunday afternoon I give up my time to teaching a Sunday-school among them. Every negro woman on this place has one of my silk dresses which I have given her. What do you say to that?” she cried vehemently. Isabey laughed at Mrs. Charteris’s final enumeration of the disposition of her old silk gowns, and the tension between them was somewhat relieved, but he went on: “I say the psychology of this struggle is strange. I think it is like what the old noblesse in France went through at the time of the Revolution. They would not believe that anything was going to happen until something had happened. Two years ago this county was like a Garden of Eden for peace, wasn’t it?”