For a moment Sylvia shrivelled before this flame from hell. But then, being the only person who had ever been able to chain this devil, she said: "Indeed? I hope that with so fashionable a name the disease does not become an epidemic!"
Mrs. Armistead gazed at her, and then, in a burst of enthusiasm, she exclaimed: "Sylvia Castleman, I have always insisted that one of the most interesting women in the world was spoiled by the taint of goodness in you."
She took Sylvia to her bosom, as it were. "Let us sit on the fence and enjoy this spectacle! My dear, you can have no idea what an uproar you are making! The young married women gather in their boudoirs and whisper ghastly secrets to each other; some of them are sure they have it, and some of them say they can trust their husbands--as if any man could be trusted as far as you can throw a bull by the horns! Did you hear about poor Mrs. Pattie Peyton, she has the measles, but she sent for a specialist, and vowed she had something else--she had read about it, and knew all the symptoms, and insisted on having elaborate blood-tests! And little Mrs. Stanley Pendleton has left her husband, and everybody says that's the reason. The men are simply shivering in their boots--they steal into the doctor's offices by the back-doors, and a whole car-load of the boys have been shipped off to Hot Springs to be boiled--" And so on, while Mrs. Armistead revelled in the sensation of strolling down Main Street with Mrs. Douglas van Tuiver!
Then Sylvia would go home, and get the newest reactions of the family to these horrors. Aunt Nannie, it seemed, made the discovery that Basil, junr., her fifth son, was carrying on an intrigue with a mulatto girl in the town; and she forbade him to go to Castleman Hall, for fear lest Sylvia should worm the secret out of him; also she shipped Lucy May off to visit a friend, and came and tried to persuade Mrs. Chilton to do the same with Peggy and Maria, lest Sylvia should somehow corrupt these children.
The bishop came, having been ordered to preach religion to his wayward niece. Poor dear Uncle Basil--he had tried preaching religion to Sylvia many years ago, and never could do it because he loved her so well that with all his Seventeenth Century theology he could not deny her chance of salvation. Now the first sight that met his eyes when he came to see her was his little blind grand-niece. And also he had in his secret heart the knowledge that he, a rich and gay young planter before he became converted to Methodism, had played with the fire of vice, and been badly burned. So Sylvia did not find him at all the Voice of Authority, but just a poor, hen-pecked, unhappy husband of a tyrannous Castleman woman.