have turned to a Stuart. But he began to cough presently, and slipped
back to the benches where the women were. Palmer heard one of them in
rusty black sob out,--"Oh, Charley! Charley!"

There was not much enthusiasm among the women; Palmer looked at them
with a dreary trail of thought in his brain. They were of the raw,
unclarified American type: thick-blooded, shrewish, with dish-shaped
faces, inelastic limbs. They had taken the war into their whole
strength, like their sisters, North and South: as women greedily do
anything that promises to be an outlet for what power of brain, heart,
or animal fervor they may have, over what is needed for wifehood or
maternity. Theodora, he thought, angrily, looked at the war as these
women did, had no poetic enthusiasm about it, did not grasp the grand
abstract theory on either side. She would not accept it as a fiery,
chivalric cause, as the Abolitionist did, nor as a stern necessity, like
the Union-saver. The sickly Louisianian, following her son from Pickens
to Richmond, besieging God for vengeance with the mad impatience of her
blood, or the Puritan mother praying beside her dead hero-boy, would
have called Dode cowardly and dull. So would those blue-eyed, gushing
girls who lift the cup of blood to their lips with as fervid an
_abandon_ as ever did French _bacchante_. Palmer despised them. Their
sleazy lives had wanted color and substance, and they found it in a cant
of patriotism, in illuminating their windows after slaughter, in
dressing their tables with helmets of sugar, (after the fashion of the
White House,)--delicate _souvenirs de la guerre!_

But Theodora and these women had seen their door-posts slopped with
blood,--that made a difference. This woman in front had found her boy's
half-charred body left tied to a tree by Rebel scouts: this girl was the
grandchild of Naylor, a man of seventy,--the Federal soldiers were fired