Of the two daughters, Grace had early fulfilled her destiny in true
Virginian fashion, by marrying a distant connection of her family, a
Mr. Royall Garnett, who had been a playmate of her brothers, and whose
plantation lay in an adjoining county. With praiseworthy conservatism,
Mrs. Garnett was duplicating the uneventful placidity of her parents'
early years, content to rule her household wisely, to love and minister
to her husband, and to devote her energies to the rearing of her
children according to time-honored precedent. Pocahontas, the youngest
of the family, was still unmarried, nay, more--still unengaged.

They had called her "Pocahontas" in obedience to the unwritten law of
southern families, which decrees that an ancestor's sin of distinction
shall be visited on generations of descendants, in the perpetuation of
a name no matter what its hideousness. It seems a peculiarity of
distinguished persons to possess names singularly devoid of beauty;
therefore, among the burdens entailed by pride upon posterity, this is
a grievous one. Some families, with the forest taint in their blood,
at an early date took refuge in the softer, prettier "Matoaca;" but not
so the Masons. It was their pride that they never shirked an
obligation, or evaded a responsibility: they did not evade this one.
Having accepted "Pocahontas" as the name by which their ancestress was
best known, they never swerved from it; holding to it undaunted by its
length and harshness, and unmoved by the discovery of historians that
Pocahontas is no name at all, but simply a pet sobriquet applicable to
all Indian girls alike, and whose signification is scarcely one of
dignity. Historians might discover, disagree, wrangle and explain, but
Pocahontas followed Pocahontas in the Mason family with the undeviating
certainty of a fixed law.