ver penetrated this medium
except in the flattering disguise of a sentiment. Having married at
twenty an idealist only less ignorant of the world than himself, he had,
inspired by her example, immediately directed his energies towards the
whitewashing of the actuality. Both cherished the naive conviction that
to acknowledge an evil is in a manner to countenance its existence, and
both clung fervently to the belief that a pretty sham has a more
intimate relation to morality than has an ugly truth. Yet so unconscious
were they of weaving this elaborate tissue of illusion around the world
they inhabited that they called the mental process by which they
distorted the reality, "taking a true view of life." To "take a true
view" was to believe what was pleasant against what was painful in spite
of evidence: to grant honesty to all men (with the possible exception of
the Yankee army and a few local scalawags known as Readjusters); to deny
virtue to no woman, not even to the New England Abolitionist; to regard
the period before the war in Virginia as attained perfection, and the
present as falling short of that perfection only inasmuch as it had
occurred since the surrender. As life in a small place, among a simple
and guileless class of gentlefolk, all passionately cherishing the same
opinions, had never shaken these illusions, it was but natural that they
should have done their best to hand them down as sacred heirlooms to
their only child. Even Gabriel's four years of hard fighting and scant
rations were enkindled by so much of the disinterested idealism that
had sent his State into the Confederacy, that he had emerged from them
with an impoverished body, but an enriched spirit. Combined with his
inherent inability to face the facts of life, there was an almost
superhuman capacity for cheerful recovery from the shocks of adversity.
Since he had married by accident the one woman who was made for him, he
had managed to preserve untarnished his innocent assumption that
marriages were arranged in Heaven--for the domestic infelicities of many
of his parishioners were powerless to affect a belief that was founded
upon a solitary personal experience. Unhappy marriages, like all other
misfortunes of society, he was inclined to regard as entirely modern and
due mainly to the decay of antebellum institutions. "I don't remember
that I ever heard of a discontented servant or an unhappy marriage in my
boyhood," he would say when he was for