To Reynolds those were days of deep and sweet excitement into which now and then darted a pang like a stab in the heart. He was with Agnes Ransom a great deal. Shy and strangely limited in conversation as she was, he yet found her monosyllables and simplest phrases quite enough to hold him to her side. She had not read a great deal of art and literature, she had but fragmentary glimpses of knowledge, her round of life had been confined to a small compass: still she seemed to have gathered a great deal, and a depth rather than a width of experience was in some subtle way suggested by her words and looks.
Moreton was unreservedly happy. Born sportsman as he was, it must have been a genuine old-time love that made him prefer sitting on the veranda or on one of the rustic benches with Miss Noble to following the pointers and setters afield under the cloudless sky and over-warm beams of this waning, low-country winter. He also allowed himself to become interested to a certain extent in the plans of Miss Crabb. From his English point of view, this eager, outspoken, persistent young woman, with her mingled air of freshness, alertness and strangely hindered ambition, was a very novel and interesting study. He recognized and respected the worthiness and purity of her aims, whilst he could not keep from regarding her doings with a curiosity little short of that with which he would have observed the gambols of a rare species of monkey. He had not been long enough in America to become indifferent to the oddities and sharp salients of American character and our social contrasts and discords, nor had his tastes resigned themselves to such breezy, democratic familiarity as Miss Crabb insisted upon; but he was a good hater of shams, and her genuineness appealed to him in its spirit if not in its manner. He walked with her an hour back and forth on one of the long verandas, scarcely aware how much he was promising when he agreed to make some sketches for her. He had been, as the reader knows, an art-student once, but had lacked either talent or industry or both, getting on no further than to become a clever sketcher. Miss Crabb told him all she knew touching every subject she could think of, even going so far as to give the details of the distressing tragic circumstances under which Mrs. Ransom had been made a widow. It was a sad story of a mere girl marrying a handsome, dashing, rather reckless youth, who led her a romantic life for a time and finally deserted her, going away to Texas where he had been killed in a street fight with a desperado at San Antonio. Such stories were rather common in the South at one time. The first decade after the close of the war was, in the Gulf States, one of humiliation, nervousness, doubt--a decade that soured and vitiated many young lives, making almost outlaws of youths who, under a milder influence would have been good citizens, or at least, harmless ones. Sudden poverty, the stagnation of agriculture and trade, the ebbing of all commercial tides, the swift leveling of social eminences, and the desperation that followed dire defeat, were supplemented and aggravated by political annoyances of the most grievous nature. But the one demoralizing element most active and potent was the prejudice, deep-seated and woven into the very tissues of the Southern youth, against gaining a livelihood by manual labor in plebeian employments. Of course it is no wonder that this prejudice existed, indeed it would have been amazing if it had not existed; but the result was the destruction of many young men who really had in them the qualities that go, under ordinary circumstances, to make up valuable citizens.