Truscott was once more
in garrison, and Miss Sanford, with quietly observant eyes, was forming
her first impressions of army life in the far West, and welcoming with
sweet and gracious manner the ladies, who could not resist their
hospitable impulse to gather on Mrs. Stannard's piazza and greet the
new-comers as soon as they had removed the dust and cinders of railway
travel, and in the bewildering freshness of their New York costumes
reappeared on the parlor floor.

That evening, of course, they held quite a levee. The band played
delightfully upon the parade, welcoming back to the frontier the
colonel's daughter, and wishing, many of them, that old Catnip, too, had
come, for he was very thoughtful and kind to his men, and they were
realizing that it is no fun to be musicians for somebody else's
regiment. Many officers and ladies called, and Mrs. Stannard's pleasant
parlor was filled from early until late. One man appeared there before
anybody else, accepted an invitation to join them at dinner and stayed
until after eleven: this was Mr. Gleason.

The sunshine of Mrs. Stannard's bonny face was something the --th were
prone to speak of very often, perhaps too often to suit other ladies,
whose visages on the domestic side were not infrequently clouded. Just
as it is an unsafe thing to speak in presence of some mothers of the
grace or beauty or behavior of other children than their own, so it is
simply idiotic to talk of Mrs. So-and-so's sweet manners or sweeter face
to Mrs. Vinaigre, who is said, at times, to be snappish. It may be far
from your intention to institute comparisons or to refer, by inference,
to graces which are lacking in the lady to whom you speak, but there is
nothing surer in life than that you get the credit of it in the fullest
sense, and that, most unwittingly, you have affronted a woman in a way
the meekest Christian of her sex will find it hard to forgive; she will
never forget it. Mrs. Stannard's smile was sweetness itself; her eyes
smiled quite as much as her mouth, and her very soul seemed to beam
through the winsome, winning beauty of her face. All the young officers
looked up to her with something akin to worship; all the elders spoke of
Mrs. Stannard as the perfection of an army wife; even her closest
friends and acquaintances could find no one trait to speak of openly as
a fault. The nearest approach to such a thing was Mrs. Turner's
exasperated and petulant outbreak when her patient lord