"You wouldn't think that was only a girl of seventeen," said Harry, as a languishing brunette, with large, liquid black eyes, and a voluptuous figure, glided by them in the waltz. "How soon these Southerners develope into women! They beat the Italians even."
"I wonder the young lady has time to grow, she dances so much. I have watched her two or three evenings, and she has never rested a moment except when the music stopped.—Something must suffer, it seems to me. Does her mind develope uniformly with her person? She is a great centre of attraction, I observe; is it only for her beauty and dancing?"
"I suppose a beautiful young woman, with fifty or sixty thousand a year, may consider mental accomplishments as superfluous. She knows, perhaps, as much as a Russian woman of five-and-twenty. How much that is, you, who have been on the Continent, know."
"Ah, an heiress; acres of cotton-fields, thousands of negroes, and so on."
"Exactly. I put the income down at half of what popular report makes it; these southern fortunes are so uncertain: the white part of the property (that is to say, the cotton) varies with the seasons; and the black part takes to itself legs, and runs off occasionally. But, at any rate, there is quite enough to make her a great prize, and an object of admiration and attention to all the little men—not to the old hands, like White and Sumner; they are built up in their own conceit, and wouldn't marry Sam Weller's 'female marchioness,' unless she made love to them first, like one of Knowles's heroines. But the juveniles are crazy about her. Robinson went off more ostentatiously love-sick than a man of his size I ever saw; and Sedley is always chanting her praises—the only man, woman, or child, he was ever known to speak well of. I don't think any of them will catch her. Edwards might dance into her heart, perhaps, if he were a little bigger; but as it is, she will, probably, make happy and rich some one in her own part of the world. She says the young men there suit her better, because they are 'more gentlemanly' than we Northerners."
"I have heard many strangers say the same thing," said Ashburner, prudently refraining from expressing any opinion of his own for he knew Benson's anti-southern feelings.
"If education has any thing to do with being a gentleman, then, whether you take education in the highest sense, as the best discipline and expansion of the mind by classical and scientific study; or in the utilitarian sense, as the acquisition of useful knowledge, and a practical acquaintance with men and things; or in the fine lady sense, as the mastery of airs, and graces, and drawing-room accomplishments; or in the moralist's sense, as the curbing of our mischievous propensities, and the energizing of our good ones—in every case, we are more of gentlemen than the Southerners. If the mere possession of wealth, and progress in the grosser and more material arts of civilization, have any thing to do with it, then, too, we are more of gentlemen. Their claims rest on two grounds: first, they live on the unpaid labor of others, while we all work, more or less, for ourselves, holding idleness as disgraceful as they do labor; secondly, they are all the time fighting duels."
"Are there no duels ever fought in this part of the country?"
"Scarcely any since Burr shot Hamilton. Alexander Hamilton was one of our greatest men, and his death excited a feeling throughout the Northern States which put down the practice almost entirely; and I certainly think it a step forward in real civilization."
"Do you mean to say that it is with you as with us, where, if a man becomes so involved in a quarrel that he is challenged, it is against him and almost ruin to him whether he fights or does not fight? Or is public opinion decidedly in favor of the man who does not fight, and against the man who does? For instance, suppose you were challenged yourself?"