Often there are no greater devotees to routine than those who are
virtually idlers. Endowed with the gift of persistence rather than
with a resolute will, it had become second nature to maintain the
daily order of action and thought which he believed to be his right
to enforce upon his household. Every one chafed under his inexorable
system except his wife. She had married when young, had grown up
into it, and supplemented it with a system of her own which took the
form of a scrupulous and periodical attention to all little details
of housekeeping. There was a constant friction, therefore, between
the careless, indolent natures of the slaves and the precise,
exacting requirements of both master and mistress. Miss Lou, as she
was generally called on the plantation, had grown up into this
routine as a flower blooms in a stiff old garden, and no amount of
repression, admonition and exhortation, not even in her younger days
of punishment, could quench her spirit or benumb her mind. She
submitted, she yielded, with varying degrees of grace or reluctance.
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