"Yes," said Virginia, scornfully, "we're all gentlemen in the South. What do we know about business and developing the resources of the country? Not THAT."
"You make my head ache, my dear," was her aunt's reply. "Where did you get all this?"
"You ask me because I am a girl," said Virginia. "You believe that women were made to look at, and to play with,—not to think. But if we are going to get ahead of the Yankees, we shall have to think. It was all very well to be a gentleman in the days of my great-grandfather. But now we have railroads and steamboats. And who builds them? The Yankees. We of the South think of our ancestors, and drift deeper and deeper into debt. We know how to fight, and we know how to command. But we have been ruined by—" here she glanced at the retreating form of Alfred, and lowered her voice, "by niggers."
Mrs. Colfax's gaze rested languidly on her niece's faces which glowed with indignation.
"You get this terrible habit of argument from Comyn," she said. "He ought to send you to boarding-school. How mean of Mr. Vance not to come! You've been talking with that old reprobate Whipple. Why does Comyn put up with him?"
"He isn't an old reprobate," said Virginia, warmly.
"You really ought to go to school," said her aunt. "Don't be eccentric.
It isn't fashionable. I suppose you wish Clarence to go into a factory."
"If I were a man," said Virginia, "and going into a factory would teach me how to make a locomotive or a cotton press, or to build a bridge, I should go into a factory. We shall never beat the Yankees until we meet them on their own ground."
"There is Mr. Vance now," said Mrs. Colfax, and added fervently, "Thank the Lord!"