Then one is tempted to step down from
the porch, and follow the voices of the birds into the vague recesses of
a night webbed with dark tree shadows outlined in blue moonlight.
Small wonder it is, if, as report says, no houseparty on a southern
plantation is a success unless young couples become "sort of engaged,"
and if in a region so provocative in springtime under a full moon, a
distinction is recognized between being merely "engaged," and being
engaged _to be married_.
One Georgia belle we met, a sloe-eyed girl whose reputation not only for
beauty but for charm reached through the entire South, had, at the time
of our visit, recently become engaged in the more grave and permanent
sense.
"How does it seem?" a girl friend asked her.
"I feel," she answered, "like a man who has built up a large business
and is about to go into the hands of a receiver."
Such ways as those girls have! Such voices! Such eyes! And such names,
too! Names which would not fit at all into a northern setting,
relatively so hard and unsentimental, but which, when one becomes
accustomed to them, take their place gracefully and harmoniously in the
southern picture. The South likes diminutives and combinations in its
women's names. Its Harriets, Franceses, Sarahs, and Marthas, become
Hatties, Fannies, Sallies and Patsies, and Patsy sometimes undergoes a
further transition and becomes Passie.
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