Into all this work of mercy Evelyn Byrd entered not only with enthusiasm, but with the tireless energy of healthy youth and with a queer sagacity—born, perhaps, of her strange life-experience—which enabled her sometimes to double or quadruple the beneficent effects of her work by the deftness of its doing.
Her enthusiasm in the cause rather astonished Dorothy, at first. If the girl had been brought up in Virginia, if her home had always been there, if she had had a people of her own there, with a father and a brother in the trenches, her devotion would have been natural enough. But none of those reasons for her enthusiasm existed. She had probably been born in Virginia, or at least of Virginian parentage, though even that assumption rested upon no better foundation than the fact that she bore a historic Virginian name. She had lived elsewhere during her childhood and youth. She had come into the Southern country under compulsion, and three fourths of the war was over before she came. So far as she knew, she had no relatives in Virginia, and very certainly she had none there whom she knew and loved.
Yet she was passionate almost to madness in her Virginianism, and she was self-sacrificing even beyond the standards of the other heroic women around her.
That she should enter passionately into any cause into which she enters at all [wrote Dorothy to Arthur during one of his absences at the front] is altogether natural. Her nature is passionate in an extreme degree, and, good as her judgment is when it is cool, she sends it about its business whenever it assumes to meddle with her passionate impulses. She has certain well-fixed principles of conduct, from which she never departs by so much as a hair’s breadth—chiefly, I imagine, because they are principles which she has wrought out in her mind without anybody’s teaching or anybody’s suggestion. They are the final results of her own thinking. She regards them as ultimates of truth. But subject to these, she is altogether a creature of impulse. Even to save one she loves from great calamity, she would not think of compromising the most trivial of her fundamental principles; yet for the sake of one she loves, she would sacrifice herself illimitably even upon the most trivial occasion. It is a dangerous character to possess, but a most interesting one to study, and certainly it is admirable.
Arthur smiled lovingly as he read this analysis. “How little we know ourselves!” he exclaimed, in thought. “If I had worked with pen and paper for a month in an effort to describe Dorothy’s own character fittingly, I couldn’t have done it so perfectly as she has done it in describing the make-up of Evelyn. Yet she never for one moment suspects the similarity. Just because the external circumstances are different in the two cases, she is utterly blind to the parallel. It doesn’t matter. It is far better to have such a character as Dorothy’s than to try to create it—much better to have it than to know that she has it.”
It is worthy of observation and remark that in his thinking about this matter of character, and admiring and loving it, Arthur Brent connected the subject altogether with Dorothy, not at all with Evelyn.
That was because Arthur Brent was in love with his wife, and happy is the man with whom such a love lingers and dominates after the honeymoon is over!
One day Dorothy and Evelyn talked of this matter of Evelyn’s enthusiasm for the Confederate cause and her passionate devotion to those who had received wounds in the service of it. It was Evelyn who started the conversation.
“The best thing about you, Dorothy,” she said, one morning while they two were waiting for a decoction they were making to drip through the filtering-paper, “is your devotion to Cousin Arthur.” Evelyn had come to that stage of Virginian culture in which affection expressed itself in the claiming of kinship where there was none. “It seems to me that that is the way every woman should feel toward her husband, if he is worthy of it, as Cousin Arthur is.”
“Tell me your whole thought, Byrdie,” answered Dorothy, who had fastened that pet name upon her companion. “It interests me.”