“We’ll all be glad—for the Captain’s sake. It has been hard for him.”
“Your father was a soldier in the war?”
“Of course,” she nodded. “He is a Mississippian.”
“Was he—was he wounded?” Philip ventured.
“Not with bullets. But he spent a year in a Northern prison.”
Philip, abashed by the implication conveyed in this, relapsed into silence. Libby Prison and Andersonville were still frightful realities in the New England mind, and the remembrance of them extinguished the fact that there had been war prisons in the North, as well.
“War is a pretty dreadful thing,” he conceded; adding: “My father was wounded at Antietam.”
“Let’s not begin to talk about the war; we’ll be quarrelling in another minute or two if we do.”
“I don’t admit that,” Philip contended amicably. “As I said a little while ago, the war is over—it’s been over for fifteen years. But let it go and tell me about Mississippi. I’ve never been farther south than we are just now.”
“Dear old Mississippi!” she said softly. And after that the talk became a gentle monologue for the greater part, in which Philip heard the story duplicated so often south of Mason and Dixon’s line; of the hardships of the war, and the greater hardships of its aftermath; of ill health and property loss; of hope deferred and almost extinguished in the case of the invalid father; of the final family council in which it had been determined to try the healing effect of the high and dry altitudes.