Our battle summer. May it be our first and our last, so
called. After all we have not had any of the horrors of war. Could there have
been a gayer, or pleasinter, life than we led in Charleston. And Montgomery,
how exciting it all was there! So many clever men and women congregated from
every part of the South. Mosquitoes, and a want of neatness, and a want of good
things to eat, drove us away. In Richmond the girls say it is perfectly
delightful. We found it so, too, but the bickering and quarreling have begun
there.
At table to-day we heard Mrs. Davis's ladies described. They
were said to wear red frocks and flats on their heads. We sat mute as mice. One
woman said she found the drawing-room of the Spotswood was warm, stuffy, and
stifling. “Poor soul,” murmured the inevitable Brewster, “and no man came to
air her in the moonlight stroll, you know. Why didn't somebody ask her out on
the piazza to see the comet?” Heavens above, what philandering was done in the
name of the comet! When you stumbled on a couple on the piazza they lifted
their eyes, and “comet” was the only word you heard. Brewster came back with a
paper from Washington with terrific threats of what they will do to us.
Threatened men live long.
There was a soft, sweet, low, and slow young lady opposite
to us. She seemed so gentle and refined, and so uncertain of everything. Mr.
Brewster called her Miss Albina McClush, who always asked her maid when a new
book was mentioned, “Seraphina, have I perused that volume?”
Mary Hammy, having a fiance in the wars, is inclined
at times to be sad and tearful. Mrs. Preston quoted her negro nurse to her: “Never
take any more trouble in your heart than you can kick off at the end of your
toes.”
SOURCE: Mary Boykin Chesnut, Edited by Isabella D. Martin
and Myrta Lockett Avary, A Diary From Dixie, p. 79
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