For Dana Charteris came of a Louisiana family whose name was as old as the state itself, and who lived in a great, pillared house and had black servants and drank blacker coffee. Custom and pride and chivalry were the goddesses of the family penetralia, and debt maintained the vestal-fires. Her father was called "Colonel" for the same reason that no less than one third of the gentlemen of his plane were given that title. Her mother, who carried an air of fragrant and faded aristocracy, read Cable and regarded him as some subaltern's wives in India regarded Kipling. And her brother, Alan--Dana hardly knew Alan. When his name was spoken in the house, it was in a hushed voice. They called him "black sheep," but Dana could never associate dark fleece with the slim boy she remembered. Alan ran away when little more than fifteen--ran away to sail the Seven Seas and to find the end of the rainbow. Every few months letters came from him, bearing post-marks that were, to her, stamps of glamour.
In her eyes her brother wore the mantle of Jason. He rambled in all manner of weird places in his quest for the golden prize. This, while she grew in an atmosphere of sweetly-musty traditions! Before she went off to boarding-school her days were divided between the piano, paddling indolently in warm bayous--sometimes alone, sometimes not--and riding a black mare. But in the quiet, breathless nights when an army of stars thronged the sky, and from down the river came the soft crooning of a Creole song, she dreamed of enchanted lands beyond the horizon.
But the voyaging ancestor and the argonaut-brother were only partly responsible for her unrest. There was Tante Lucie, down in New Orleans. (Tante Lucie, who made one think of star-jasmines and all the romantic things that aura the Old South.) She had stories to tell, for a lover-husband had taken her adventuring. She had seen the Shwe Dagon and looked upon the Taj by moonlight. Her lover-husband was only a memory, as were the temple and the Tomb; but she loved to talk of them, sitting in her little court where the perfume of magnolias swam in the air.
Dana's father died just before her eighteenth birthday. In the years following, her mother no longer read Cable; she sat and dreamed of her argonaut-son and of the "Colonel." And Dana almost stifled her desire to cross the seas. For ominous sounds disturbed the quiet of Bayou Latouche; there were bandages to be made and books and boxes to be shipped to camps. During that period the letters from Alan were infrequent and from Mesopotamia.