Excerpt: ...I will not venture further." "You had better not, or you may fail like other prophets." "No, I was thinking as you spoke of the fact that Leila has seen a good deal of a very interesting society in Baltimore, and has had the chance, and I am sure the desire, to hear more of the wild Southern party-talk than most girls have." "Yes, she has been in both camps." "And always was and is, I fancy, eagerly curious in the best sense. More than my dear Mrs. Ann, she has wide intellectual sympathies-and appetites." "That's a very fine phrase, Mark." "Isn't it, Squire? I was also comparing in my mind John's want of association with men of his own social accident of position. He lived here with some rough country lads and with you and me. He has had no such chance as Leila's." "Oh, the Point will mature him. Then two years on the Plains-and after that the mills." "Perhaps-two years! But, Penhallow, who can dare to predict what God has in store for us. Two years!" "Yes-too true-who can! Just now we are financially diseased, and men are thinking more of the bread and butter and debts of to-morrow than of Mr. Buchanan in the toils of his Southern Cabinet." "That's so. Good-night." Leila took upstairs with her John's last letter to her aunt, and sitting down read it eagerly: "WEST POINT. "MY DEAR AUNT: The life here, as I wrote you, is something almost monastic in its systematic regularity, and its despotic claims on one's time. It leaves small leisure for letters except on Sundays; and if a fellow means to be well placed, even then he is wise to do some work. The outside world seems far away, and we read and can read few papers. "I am of Uncle Jim's politics, but although there are many pretty sensitive cadets from the South, some of them my friends, there is so pleasant a camaraderie among us that there are few quarrels, and certainly none of the bitterness of the two sections. "I think I may have told you that we have no furlough until we have been here...