"She has never recovered. Her health seems to have given way."
"She needs coddling, that's the manner of women and babies. Do you coddle her? It's worth while, though some men don't know how to do it. Lord, Lord, I remember when my poor mother was on her death-bed and my father got on his knees and asked her if he'd been a good husband (she was his third wife and died of her tenth child), she looked at him with a kind of gentle resentment and replied: 'You were a saint, I suppose, Samuel, but I'd rather have had a sinner that would have coddled me.' She was the prim, flat-bosomed type, too, just like Miss Mitty Bland, and my father said afterwards, crying like a baby, that he had so much respect for her he would as soon have thought of trying to coddle a Lombardy poplar. Poplar or mimosa tree, I tell you, they are all made that way, every last one of them—and nothing on earth made poor Miss Matoaca a fire-eater and a disturber of the peace except that she didn't have a man to coddle her."
"I give Sally everything under heaven I can think of, but she doesn't appear to want it."
"Keep on giving, it's the only way. You'll see her begin to pick up presently before you know it. They ain't rational, my boy, that's the whole truth about 'em, they ain't rational. If Miss Matoaca had belonged to a rational sex, do you think she'd have killed herself trying to get on an equality with us? You can't make a pullet into a rooster by teaching it to crow, as my old mammy used to say." For a minute he was silent, and appeared to be meditating. "I tell you what I'll do, Ben," he said at last, with a flash of inspiration, "I'll go in with you and see if I can't cheer up Sally a bit."
When we reached my door, he let the reins fall over the back of his old horse, and getting out, hobbled, with my assistance, upstairs, and into Sally's sitting-room, where we found George Bolingbroke, looking depressed and sullen.
She was charmingly dressed, as usual, and as the General entered, she came forward to meet him with the gracious manner which some one had told me was a part, not of her Bland, but of her Fairfax inheritance. "That's a pretty tea-gown you've got on," observed the great man, in the playful tone in which he might have remarked to a baby that it was wearing a beautiful bib. "You haven't been paying much attention to fripperies of late, Ben tells me. Have you seen any hats? I don't know anything better for a woman's low spirits, my dear, than a trip to New York to buy a hat."
She laughed merrily, while her eyes met George Bolingbroke's over the General's head.
"I bought six hats last month," she replied.
"And you didn't feel any better?"
"Not permanently. Then Ben got me a diamond bracelet." She held out her arm, with the bracelet on her wrist, which looked thin and transparent.