"Has your wife no relatives in the South who might have made you understand how we Southern women must feel?" she asked.
"I have never seen her Southern relatives."
"Pardon the curiosity of an old woman," she went on, watching him keenly; "may I ask why?"
"My wife's mother did not choose to know the Yankee her daughter married."
"I did not choose to force an acquaintance or to be known on sufferance," he answered crisply. "I was aware of no wrong, and I did not choose to ask to be forgiven for being a Northerner."
She knew that in her heart she was already accepting this strong, fine man, alien as he was to all the traditions of her life, and she was not ill pleased at his pride.
"But have you ever considered what it must have cost the mother to give up her daughter?"
"Why need she have given her up? Marriages between the North and the South have been common enough without any family breach."
She was utterly sure that he knew neither to whom he was talking nor what had been the real cause of her separation from her daughter. She experienced a sort of wild inner exultation that at last had come the moment when she might justify herself; when she might tell the whole dreadful story which had been as eating poison in her veins. She raised her head proudly, and looked at him with her whole soul in her eyes.
"If you have patience to listen," she said, feeling her cheeks warm, "and will pardon my being personal, I should like to tell you what has happened to me. My husband was a colonel in the Confederate army. We were married when I was seventeen, in a brief furlough he won by being wounded at the battle of the Wilderness. I saw him, in the four years of the war before he fell at Five Forks, less than a dozen times, and always for the briefest visits--poor scraps of fearful happiness torn out of long stretches of agony. My daughter, my only child, was born after her father's death. Our fortune had gone to the Cause. My father and my husband both refused to invest money abroad. They considered it disloyal, and they put everything into Confederate securities even after they felt sure they should get nothing back. They were too loyal to withhold anything when the country was in deadly peril."