Even if the Halls were not in mourning, no one lives through such a time
without feeling the common humanity. But Bessie, though she lingered on the
brink of love as of all the other deeps of life--curious, adventurous, at
once willing and reluctant--was still, in the end, quite steady.
When the war was over, the Halls were poor, on a competence of land run to
waste, with no labor to work it, and no market to sell it. And Mr. Hall,
like so many of his generation, was too hampered by habit and crushed by
reminiscence to meet the new day.
It was the contrast in Guy's spirit that won Bessie. His was indeed the
immemorial spirit of youth--whether it be of the young world, or the young
male, or the young South--to accept the issue of trial by combat and give
loyalty to one proved equally worthy of sword or hand.
"We're whipped," he told her, "and that settles it. Now there's other work
for us than brooding over it. All the same, the South has a future, Bibi,
and that means a future for you and me."
"Not in the manufacture of poetry, I'm afraid," she laughed. "You dropped a
stitch."
She did not seem to take his prowess, either past or to come, very
seriously; and her eyebrows and her inflection went up at the assumption of
the "we" in his plans.
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