Her eyes were her only weakness. They were deep and hazel, and given to drooping too readily with that feigned modesty wherein vanity clothes boldness. Down in their depths, also, shone that bright, penetrating spark of a taper by which Folly lights, in woman, the lamp of ambition.
Her forehead was high—her whole bearing the unconscious one of a born lady.
Romance—girlish, idealized romance—was her's to-day. A good intentioned, but thoughtless romance—and therefore a weak one. And worse still, one which, coupled with ambition, might be led to ruin.
Down through the tangled box-planted walks she strolled, swinging her dainty hat of straw and old lace in her hand; on through the small gate that bound the first yard, then through the shaded lawn, unkept now and rank with weeds, but still holding the old trees which, in other days, looked down over the well kept lawn of grass beneath. Now gaunt hogs had rooted it up and the weeds had taken it, and the limbs of the old trees, falling, had been permitted to lie as they fell.
The first fence was down. She walked across the road and took a path leading through a cottonfield, which, protected on all sides by the wood, and being on the elevated plateau on which the residence stood, had escaped the severer frosts.
And so she stopped and stood amid it, waist high.
The very act of her stopping showed the romance of her nature.
She had seen the fields of cotton all her life, but she could never pass through one in bloom and in fruit—the white and purple blossoms, mingled with the green of the leaves and all banked over billows of snowy lint,—that she did not stop, thrilled with the same childhood feeling that came with the first reading of the Arabian Nights.
She had seen the field when it was first plowed, in the spring, and the small furrows were thrown up by the little turning shovels. Then, down the entire length of the ridge the cotton-planter had followed, its two little wheels straddling the row, while the small bull-tongue in front opened the shallow furrow for the linty, furry, white seeds to fall in and be covered immediately by the mold-board behind. She had seen it spring up from one end of the ridge to the other, like peas, then chopped out by the hoe, the plants left standing, each the width of the hoe apart. Then she had watched it all summer, growing under the Southern sun, throwing out limb above limb of beautiful delicate leaves, drawing their life and sustenance more from the air and sunshine above than from the dark soil beneath. Drawing it from the air and sunshine above, and therefore cotton, silken, snowy cotton—with the warmth of the sun in the skein of its sheen and the purity of heaven in the fleece of its fold.
Child of the air and the sky and sun; therefore, cotton—and not corn, which draws its life from the clay and mud and decay which comes from below.