For his wife was a
Southerner, a born slaveholder, and a secessionist, whose noted
prejudices to the North had even outrun her late husband's politics. At
first the piquancy and recklessness of her opinionative speech amused
him as part of her characteristic flavor, or as a lingering youthfulness
which the maturer intellect always pardons. He had never taken her
politics seriously--why should he? With her head on his shoulder he had
listened to her extravagant diatribes against the North. He had forgiven
her outrageous indictment of his caste and his associates for the sake
of the imperious but handsome lips that uttered it. But when he was
compelled to listen to her words echoed and repeated by her friends and
family; when he found that with the clannishness of her race she had
drawn closer to them in this controversy,--that she depended upon them
for her intelligence and information rather than upon him,--he had
awakened to the reality of his situation. He had borne the allusions
of her brother, whose old scorn for his dependent childhood had been
embittered by his sister's marriage and was now scarcely concealed. Yet,
while he had never altered his own political faith and social creed
in this antagonistic atmosphere, he had often wondered, with his old
conscientiousness and characteristic self-abnegation, whether his own
political convictions were not merely a revulsion from his domestic
tyranny and alien surroundings.
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