“To be sure. But then, I think you can often see whether a person understands people, even if you don’t know any of them.”
“Oh yes—yes,” answered Easton.
They had crossed the road from the farmhouse and, traversing some sloping meadows, were at the border of the wood in which the tall brakes grew, with delicate shapes of fern slowly waving and swaying in the breeze. He was offering her his hand to help her over the wall into the wood, and she was throwing half her elastic weight upon his happy arm. Gilbert and the young girls were far ahead among the brakes, which their movement tossed about them with a continual, gracious rise and fall of the stately plumes, the bright colors of the girls’ dresses deepening their tint as they glimmered through the undulant greenery.
“How lovely!” cried Mrs. Farrell. She chose to sit still a moment on the wall. “And isn’t your friend superb in his white flannel and his planterish-looking hat? When I was a little girl I was traveling with my father on the Mississippi, and one night a New Orleans boat landed alongside of us. The most that I can remember is those iron baskets of burning pine-knots they stick into the shore, and the slim, dark young Southerners, in white linen from head to foot, as they came on and off the boat in the red light. I felt then that I never could marry anybody but a young Southerner in white linen. Your friend reminds me of them. But he isn’t Southern?”
“No; he was South before the war, awhile, and he tried a cotton plantation after the war; but he’s a New-Yorker.”
“How picturesque he is!” sighed Mrs. Farrell. “Was he a soldier?”
“Yes. He’s Major Gilbert, if you like.”
“Was that where you met him, in the army?”
“Yes.”
“And were you a major, too?”