out of my starched shirt and my evening clothes, and the
timidity of the ballroom had no part in me under the open sky.
"Johnson's Dictionary wasn't my only teacher," I retorted, "nor was the
General. At ten years of age I could recite the prosiest speeches of Sir
Charles Grandison."

"Ah, that explains it. Well, I'm glad anyway you didn't learn it from
the General. He broke poor Aunt Matoaca's heart, you know."

"Then I hope he managed to break his own at the same time."

"He didn't. I don't believe he had a big enough one to break. Oh, yes,
I've always detested your great man, the General. They were engaged to
be married, you have heard, I suppose, and three weeks before the
wedding she found out some dreadful things about his life--and she
behaved then, as Dr. Theophilus used to say, 'like a gentleman of
honour.' He--he ought to have married another woman, but even after Aunt
Matoaca gave him up, he refused to do it--and this was what she never
got over. If he had behaved as dishonourably as that in business, no man
would have spoken to him, she said--and can you believe it?--she
declined to speak to him for twenty years, though she was desperately in
love with him all the time. She only began again when he got old and
gouty and humbled himself to her. In my heart of hearts I can't help
disliking him in spite of all his success, but I really believe that he
has never in his life cared for any woman except Aunt Matoaca. It's
because she's so perfectly honourable, I think--but, of course, it is
her terrible experience that has made her so--so extreme in her views."

"What are her views?"

"She calls them principles--but Aunt Mitty says, and I suppose she's
right, that it would have been more ladylike to have borne her wrongs in
silence instead of shrieking them aloud. For my part I think that,
however loud she shrieked, she couldn't shriek as loud as the General
has acted."

"I hope she isn't still in love with him?"

Her clear rippling laugh--the laugh of a free spirit--fluted over the
broomsedge. "Can you imagine it? One might quite as well be in love with
one's Thanksgiving turkey. No, she isn't in love with him now, but she's
in love with the idea that she used to be, and that's almost as bad. I
know it's her own past that makes her think all the time about the
wrongs of women. She wants to have them vote, and make the laws, and
have a voice in the government. Do you?"

"I never thought about it, but I'm p