Free This Side of Glory by Gwen Bristow Page A

yet hardly penetrated), and then lying back to contemplate the canopy over my head until a black woman in a plaid tignon and gold earrings comes in with coffee. It is not always the same woman, for we have enough servants to run the White House, but Kester says that most of them were born on the plantation and he’d have to take care of them anyway. At length we get dressed and go downstairs to a breakfast room full of flowers and mahogany, to put away quantities of hominy grits, ham and hot waffles. Meanwhile another of these ubiquitous darkies has brought the horses around, and after breakfast Kester and I go riding to look at the cottonfields. I am learning a lot about cotton. At first Kester was startled that I should ride astride, but when I told him the nicest ladies were doing it nowadays and I couldn’t learn to manage a sidesaddle anyway, he acquiesced. After awhile, leaving him in the cotton, I come indoors. On the assumption that I must be weary after my exertions, another colored girl changes me into a diaphanous dressing-gown trimmed with ostrich feathers, and I retire into my damask boudoir to sip lemonade and write letters of thanks for my wedding presents.
    “As the adjustment to matronly responsibilities is assumed to be arduous enough to make assistance welcome, Kester’s mother is here for a month to carry part of my new burden. While I am riding and writing letters she is doing the housekeeping—so far I am treated like a guest who must on no account trouble her pretty head about such matters. At two o’clock I get dressed for dinner, which we eat in a dining-room the size of a state banqueting hall. The food here is divine, it’s like eating at Antoine’s every day. Suspended from the ceiling over the table hangs the long fan (they call it a besom) that a little Negro boy used to swing during every meal to blow away flies. It has no purpose in these days of screened windows, but I am beginning to have a certain tenderness for these picturesque anachronisms.
    “After dinner I get dressed again—this time very carefully, for I am about to be put on exhibit—and go down to the parlor with Mrs. Larne and sit nicely receiving calls. She occupies her hands embroidering an altar-cloth for St. Margaret’s Protestant Episcopal Church. I occupy my hands with nothing, because if I sat holding stitchery everyone would think I was making tiny garments, and, though I am doing no such thing, any suggestion that such an event is possible would be indelicate. And the callers come. Apparently every lady in the parish thinks it necessary to interrupt her affairs during these first weeks so that my life can be enriched by her acquaintance. Most of the calls last exactly half an hour. Mrs. Larne acts as my duenna. A bride being supposedly too young and innocent to choose her friends without guidance, Lysiane drops hints into my ears—Mrs. Thingumbob comes of one of the finest families in Louisiana and is to be cultivated; Mrs. Soandso was talked about before her marriage, no doubt unjustly but it’s always wise to be careful. New people are generally those who have moved into the neighborhood since the Civil War. They all say ‘since the war’ as though it happened last Tuesday.
    “Some of the ladies are charming, some irritating and some dull. Yesterday our butler, Cameo, announced the Durham girls. Three ancient ladies filed in, all in black, and sat weirdly in a row, surveying me so solemnly that I thanked heaven for Lysiane, who talked to them about their Sunday School classes. That evening I asked Kester why the three ladies were called girls, and with a wicked glint in his eye he answered, ‘Their house caught fire one night when they were mites of fifty or so, and recounting the accident the next day their father said, “My wife and I were perfectly calm but the children got a little excited.”’
    “We have supper by lamplight. In the evening Kester’s mother tactfully removes herself—either she