! With that population of roosters making the dawn hideous! I'd
choose the quiet of Piccadilly before that of a barnyard."

"You aren't used to country noises yet, and I suppose at first they are
trying."

"Do you drive? Do you walk? How do you amuse yourself?"

"One doesn't have amusement when one is a hopeless invalid; one has only
medicines. No, the roads are too heavy for driving except for a month or
two in the summer. I can't walk of course, because of my heart, and as
there has been no man on the place for ten years, I do not feel that
it is safe for Kesiah to go off the lawn by herself. Once she got into
quite a dreadful state about her liver and lack of exercise--(poor dear
mother used to say that the difference between the liver of a lady and
that of another person, was that one required no exercise and the
other did)--but Kesiah, who is the best creature in the world, is very
eccentric in some ways, and she imagines that her health suffers when
she is kept in the house for several years. Once she got into a temper
and walked a mile or two on the road, but when she returned I was in
such a state of nervousness that she promised me never to leave the lawn
again unless a gentleman was with her."

"What an angel you must be to have suffered so much and complained so
little!" he exclaimed with fervour, kissing her hand.

Her eyes, which reminded him of dying violets, drooped over him above
the peacock feathers she waved gently before her.

"Poor Kesiah, it is hard on her, too," she observed, "and I sometimes
think she is unjust enough to blame me in her heart."

"But she doesn't feel things as you do, one can tell that to look at
her."

"She isn't so sensitive and silly, you dear boy, but my poor nerves are
responsible for that, you must remember. If Kesiah had been a man she
would have been an artist, and it was really a pity that she happened to
be born a woman. When she was young she had a perfect mania for drawing,
and it used to distress mother so much. A famous portrait painter--I
can't recall his name though I am sure it began with S--saw one of her
sketches by accident and insisted that we ought to send her to Paris to
study. Kesiah was wild to go at the time, but of course it was out of
the question that a Virginia lady should go off by herself and paint
perfectly nude people in a foreign city. There was a dreadful scene, I
remember, and Kesiah even wrote to Uncle William Burwell and asked him
to