mbled his enemy. It may be
added that his linen was fine and immaculate, his black string-tie
precisely tied and a pair of gold-rimmed eye-glasses swung by a flat
black cord against his white waistcoat. There was a touch of the
military in the squareness of shoulder and the lift of the rugged head,
no less than in the gallant little bow with which he rose to greet the
girl coming toward them.

"Shirley," said her mother, "the major's brutal, and he shan't have his
mint-julep."

"What has he been doing?" asked the other, her brows wrinkling in a
delightful way she had.

"He has reminded me that I'm growing old."

Shirley looked at the major skeptically, for his chivalry was undoubted.
During a long career in law and legislature it had been said of him that
he could neither speak on the tariff question nor defend a man for
murder, without first paying a tribute to "the women of the South, sah."

"Nothing of the sort," he rumbled.

Mrs. Dandridge's face softened to wistfulness. "Shirley, _am_ I?" she
asked, with a quizzical, almost a droll uneasiness. "Why, I've got every
emotion I've ever had. I read all the new French novels, and I'm even
thinking of going in for the militant suffragette movement."

The girl had tossed her hat and crop on the table and seated herself by
her mother's chair. Now reaching down, she drew one of the fragile
blue-veined hands up against her cheek, her bronze hair, its heavy coil
loosened, dropping over one shoulder like sunlit seaweed. "What was it
he said, dearest?"

"He thinks I ought to wear a worsted shawl and arctics." Her mother
thrust out one little thin-slippered foot, with its slender ankle
gleaming through its open-work stocking like mother-of-pearl. "Imagine!
In _May_. And he knows I'm vain of my feet! Major, if you had ever had a
wife, you would have learned wisdom. But you mean well, and I'll take
back what I said about the julep. You mix it, Shirley. Yours is even
better than Ranston's.

"She makes me one every day, Monty," she continued, as Shirley went into
the house. "And when she isn't looking, I pour it into the bush there.
See those huge, maudlin-looking roses? That's the shameless result. It's
a new species. I'm going to name it _Tipsium Giganticum_."

Major Bristow laughed as he bit the end off a cigar. "All the same," he
said in his big rumbling voice, "you need 'em, I reckon. You need more
than mint-juleps, too. You leave the whisky to me and the doctor, and