She was of a type of woman which he had never seen until he came to Virginia--delicate, soft-voiced, pious, the chief and only hard worker on the estate, carrying easily the burden of thought and care for her family, her unbroken stream of guests, and army of servants. Lyddon, who looked deep into souls, knew the extraordinary courage, the singular tenacity, the silent, passionate loves and hates of women like Mrs. Tremaine. One of the ever strange problems to him was that this type of woman was remarkably pleasant to live with, and was ever full of the small, sweet courtesies of life. He reckoned these women, however, dangerous when they were roused. Mrs. Tremaine, nearly sixty, when sixty was considered old, had a faded rose beauty around which the fragrance of the summer ever lingered. She gave the impression of a woman who had lived a life of luxury and seclusion when, as a matter of fact, she had, ever since her marriage, carried the burden of a general who organizes and directs an army. She had, however, that which gives to women perpetual youth, the adoration of her husband, of her three sons, and of all who lived in daily contact with her. Colonel Tremaine, tall, thin, and somewhat angular, with a face clear-cut like a cameo, had been reckoned the handsomest man of his day and the most superb dandy in the State of Virginia. He adhered rigidly to the fashions of forty years before, when he had been in the zenith of his beauty. He wore his hair plastered down in pigeon wings on each side of his forehead and these pigeon wings were of a beautiful dark brown in spite of Colonel Tremaine’s seventy-two years. The secret of the colonel’s lustrous locks was known only to himself and to Hector, and even Mrs. Tremaine maintained a delicate reserve concerning it. Colonel Tremaine also held tenaciously to a high collar with a black silk stock, and his shirt front was a delicate mass of thread cambric ruffles, hemstitched by Mrs. Tremaine’s own hands. His manners were as affected as his dress and he was given to genuflections, gyrations, and courtly wavings of his hands in addressing persons from Mrs. Tremaine down to the smallest black child on the estate. But under his air of an elderly Lovelace lay sense, courage, honor, and the tenderest heart in the world.