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Updated: June 29, 2025
The artist was a new French painter, who had leaped into prominence because of a certain extravagance of style which he affected; and his work had taken Kemper's fancy as everything took it either in art or in life which deviated in any marked eccentricity from the ordinary level of culture or of experience. "There's something queer about it I don't like it," said Laura, with her first glance.
Satisfied of the safe arrival of Kirby Smith, and ordering him up, with Elzey's Brigade, Johnston directs Kershaw's 2nd and Cash's 8th South Carolina Regiments, which have just come up, with Kemper's Battery, from Bonham's Brigade, to strengthen the Rebel left, against the attempt which we are still making to reach around it, about the Sudley road, to take it in reverse.
But it is not in human nature to continue that advance in the teeth of the withering fire from Jackson's batteries, strengthened, as they are, by Pelham's and Kemper's. The gallant fellows fall back, rally again, advance once more, retire again, and at last, the heroic Cameron being mortally wounded, fall back, in confusion, under the cover of the hill.
Even Gerty she had tried to avoid since the afternoon in Kemper's rooms, but Gerty, who was in her gayest mood, drove down every day "to overturn," as she carelessly remarked, "the newest presents." "I'm heartily glad you're going to Europe," she said, "and I hope by the time you come back you'll have lost that nervous look in your face. It never used to be there and I don't like it."
The letter which she had destroyed was her half of this lie, she saw, and it seemed to her that Kemper's share was in his old love for Jennie Alta.
There was a note almost of relief in her voice as she spoke for she knew now that, so long as he refused to be serious, she could not tell him until to-morrow. Two weeks later Laura was still able to assure herself that it was this lack of "seriousness" in Kemper's manner which had kept her from alluding to the burned letter.
Her imagination, he saw, had created an ideal lover in Kemper's shape, and in the moment of her awakening she had turned away not from the falsehood, but from the truth. "Though he is not what I loved yet I will still love him!" her heart had cried, in a subjection to the old false feminine belief that faithfulness to a mistaken ideal is not weakness but virtue.
In her first shock, even while the blow still blinded her eyes, she turned to seek wildly for some possible solution; and it was then that she discovered that the letter, in Kemper's handwriting, was addressed evidently to some other woman, since it bore the date of a day in June just three years before she had first met him.
He slept on his arms the heavy sleep of utter weariness, which Little Kemper's bugle call broke at three o'clock the next morning. Before the August sun had crawled over the eastern horizon the armies were swinging up the Peiho river toward Peking.
In the pauses of this sentiment she realised that their thoughts sprang as far asunder as the poles, and as she looked from Gerty to the wedding presents scattered in satin boxes on chairs and tables, the fact that the step she took was irrevocable, that in three days she would be Kemper's wife, that there was no possible escape from it now, produced a sudden sickening terror in her heart.
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