And now the young ones are in bed and I am wide awake. It is
an odd thing; in all my life how many persons have I seen in love? Not a
half-dozen. And I am a tolerably close observer, a faithful watcher have I been
from my youth upward of men and manners. Society has been for me only an
enlarged field for character study.
Flirtation is the business of society; that is, playing at love-making.
It begins in vanity, it ends in vanity. It is spurred on by idleness and a want
of any other excitement. Flattery, battledore and shuttlecock, how in this game
flattery is dashed backward and forward. It is so soothing to self-conceit. If
it begins and ends in vanity, vexation of spirit supervenes sometimes. They do
occasionally burn their fingers awfully, playing with fire, but there are no
hearts broken. Each party in a flirtation has secured a sympathetic listener,
to whom he or she can talk of himself or herself—somebody who, for the time,
admires one exclusively, and, as the French say, excessivement. It is a
pleasant, but very foolish game, and so to bed.
Hood and Thomas have had a fearful fight, with carnage and
loss of generals excessive in proportion to numbers. That means they were
leading and urging their men up to the enemy. I know how Bartow and Barnard Bee
were killed bringing up their men. One of Mr. Chesnut's sins thrown in his
teeth by the Legislature of South Carolina was that he procured the promotion
of Gist, “State Rights” Gist, by his influence in Richmond. What have these
comfortable, stay-at-home patriots to say of General Gist now? “And how could
man die better than facing fearful odds,” etc.
So Fort McAlister has fallen! Good-by, Savannah! Our
Governor announces himself a follower of Joe Brown, of Georgia. Another famous
Joe.
SOURCES: Mary Boykin Chesnut, Edited by Isabella D. Martin
and Myrta Lockett Avary, A Diary From Dixie, p. 338-9
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