She habitually wore light mourning for the two excellent reasons she herself gave, although General Winchester had been dead these twelve years.
"In the first place," she always said, when Carolina tried to coax her to leave off her veil at least in warm weather, "mourning is so dignified, especially in the chaperoning of a young and charming girl. In the second place, age shows first of all in a woman's neck, try as she may to conceal it. In the third place, a large woman ought always to wear black if she knows what she is about, and as to my bonnet always being a trifle crooked, as you say it is, well, Carolina, little as I like to say it, I really think that is your fault. It would be so easy for you to keep your eye on it and give me a hint. I only ask these two things of you."
"I'll try, Cousin Lois," Carolina always hastened to say, "though really a crooked bonnet on you does not look as bad as it would on some women. If you can understand me, it really seems to become you--it looks so natural and so comfortable."
"Now, Carolina, that is only your dear way of trying to set me à mon aise! As if a crooked bonnet ever could look nice!"
Yet she cast a glance into the mirror as she spoke, and seeing that her bonnet was even then a point off the compass she forebore to change it. Such graceful yielding to flattery was in itself a charm. But the thing about Mrs. Winchester, which proved a never-failing source of amusement to the laughter-loving, was her amusing habit of miscalling words. She habitually interpolated into her sentences words beginning with the same letter as the term she had intended, as if her brain had been switched off before completing its thought and her tongue did the best it could, left without a guide.
"Carolina," she would say, "come and look up Zurich on the map for me; I can't see without my gloves."
In her hours of greatest depression this trait never failed to amuse Carolina, and when, on one occasion, Cousin Lois took the tissue-paper from around a new bonnet, folded the paper carefully and put it in the hat-box and threw the bonnet in the waste-basket, Carolina laughed herself into hysterics.
Carolina was genuinely fond of Cousin Lois, but it must be confessed that one great secret of her attractiveness for the girl was because much of Cousin Lois's early childhood had been spent at Guildford, when she had been a ward of General Lee's, and thus had met his nephew, Rhett Winchester, whom she afterward married.
Thus, while not related to their immediate family, Cousin Lois was inextricably mixed up with their history and knew all the traditions which Carolina so prized.
Although Mrs. Winchester deplored Carolina's persistence in so dwelling upon the past and brooding over her loss, nothing ever really interested this girl except to talk about her father or the golden days of Guildford.