“In the heart of every Southern woman,” she said solemnly, though now without bitterness, “is always the anguish of our Lost Cause. We cover the surface, we accept, and God knows we have been patient; but each of us has deep down a sense of the blood that was poured out in vain, of the agony of the men we loved, of how they were humiliated—humiliated, and of the great cause of liberty lost—lost!”
For long, bitter years she had not spoken even to her nearest friends as she was talking to this stranger, this Northerner. The consciousness of this brought her back to the remembrance that he was the husband of her daughter.
“Has your wife no relatives in the South who might have made you understand how we Southern women must feel?” she asked.
He grew instantly colder.
“I have never seen her Southern relatives.”
“Pardon the curiosity of an old woman,” she went on, watching him keenly; “may I ask why?”
“My wife’s mother did not choose to know the Yankee her daughter married.”
“And you?”
“I did not choose to force an acquaintance or to be known on sufferance,” he answered crisply. “I was aware of no wrong, and I did not choose to ask to be forgiven for being a Northerner.”