shed them all, both for him and for herself, before ever he saw the
light. My turn came next.

"You have been married, madam? Did you love, too? I do not mean regard,
or even calm affection; I do not mean sense of duty, self-sacrifice, or
religious goodness. I mean love--love that absorbs the entire being.
Some women love so; I do not say they are the happiest women. I do not
say they are the best. I am one of them. But God made us all; he gave us
our hearts--we did not choose them. Let no woman take credit to herself
for her even life, simply because it has been even. Doubtless, if he had
put her out in the breakers, she would have swayed too. Perhaps she
would have drifted from her moorings also, as I have drifted. I go to no
church; I can not pray. But do not think I am defiant; no. I am only
dead. I seek not the old friends, few and ruined, who remain still
above-ground; I have no hope, I might almost say no wish. Torpidly I
draw my breath through day and night, nor care if the rain falls or the
sun shines. You Northern women would work; I can not. Neither have I the
courage to take the child and die. I live on as the palsied animal
lives, and if some day the spring fails, and the few herbs within his
reach, he dies. Nor do I think he grieves much about it; he only eats
from habit. So I.

"It was in the third year of the war that I met Ralph Kinsolving. I was
just eighteen. Our courtship was short; indeed, I hardly knew that I
loved him until he spoke and asked me to give him myself. 'Marry me,
Judith,' he pleaded ardently; 'marry me before I go; let it be my wife I
leave behind me, and not my sweetheart. For sweethearts, dear, can not
come to us in camp when we send, as we shall surely send soon, that you
may all see our last grand review.' So spoke Rafe, and with all his
heart he believed it. We all believed it. Never for a moment did we
doubt the final triumph of our arms. We were so sure we were right!

"'Our last grand review,' said Rafe; but he did not dream of that last
review at Appomattox, when eight thousand hungry, exhausted men stacked
their muskets in the presence of the enemy, whose glittering ranks,
eighty thousand strong, were drawn up in line before them, while in the
rear their well-filled wagons stood--wagons whose generous plenty
brought tears to the eyes of many a poor fellow that day, thinking, even
while he eagerly ate, of his desolated land, and his own empty fields at
home.

"I did marry