Theo escaped from the rice talk and went upstairs to bed. Her father-in-law was kind and courteous, but he was so dull. He had but three topics of conversation—rice, his fighting days under General Marion, and his race-horses. They all bored her, though she hid it quite successfully. During race week in February she had made pretense of sharing the delirious excitement which apparently gripped the whole of South Carolina, but it had not really seemed very important that Colonel William's Maria was unaccountably beaten by Trumpeter for the Jockey Club Purse. Yet to the Alstons, including Joseph, it seemed to be stark tragedy. They had talked of nothing else for weeks.

Imagine Aaron, who lost the Presidency with airy grace and humor, being cast into deepest gloom at the loss of a trifling purse. There were so many more interesting things in life than rice and racing or prosy details of inconclusive battles fought long before she was born.

She sighed, turning her unwieldy body slowly in the bed, searching for a cooler spot. A melodious clangor of church bells jangled across the city. Saint Michael's, Saint Philip's, and the Huguenot Church one after another struck the hour. Only nine o'clock and a long night ahead. Of late, though she felt dull and heavy all the time, and occasionally drifted without warning into a dreamy stupor, yet real sleep eluded her.

I wish Father would come, she thought miserably. I want him so.

She struggled up from the bed, and fetched the small leather box in which she kept his letters, to re-read the last one. He had been upset by the carefully unalarming bulletins from Theo about her health. 'Why have you not gone to the mountains as I wished you to?' he wrote. 'All places on the Carolina seacoast are subject to excessive heat and fever at this time of year.'

To Joseph he had written more strongly: 'I learn with a good deal of regret that the mountain plan is abandoned.... With Theodosia's Northern constitution she will bring you some puny brat that will never last the summer out; but, in your mountains, one might expect to see it climb a precipice at three weeks old. Truly I mean to be serious, and beg to know whether you have, in fact, resolved, and whether the resolution has, in good faith, been the result of reflection or of inertness.'

Joseph had resented this particular attempt to regulate his conduct. Had he not already shown excessive caution by bringing Theo to the city long before it was necessary, and in granting her leave to consult a doctor? Moreover, he intended to transfer her to Sullivan's Island, as his father suggested. He was amazed to find that Theo had no such intention, and that to all his arguments she presented a quiet inflexibility. She would risk the fever, risk the waxing heat, but she would not leave Charleston until Aaron arrived.